Nanoscopy Wins Nobel

The Scientist » News & Opinion » Daily News               

Nanoscopy Wins Nobel

Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell, and William Moerner have won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy."

 

By Tracy Vence | October 8, 2014

 





Eric Betzig (left), Stefan Hell (middle), and William

Moerner take home this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry

for their work on super-resolved fluorescence

microscopy.

ILL. N. ELMEHED. © NOBEL MEDIA 2014; WIKIMEDIA COMMONS;

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, K. LOWDER

Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell, and William Moerner have won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.”

 

Betzig, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia; Hell, of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and the German Cancer Research Center; and Stanford University’s Moerner will share this year’s prize equally. The three are being honored for bringing “optical microscopy into the nanodimension,” enabling scientists to “study living cells in the tiniest molecular detail,” the Nobel Foundation said in its press release announcing the award.

 

In 2000, Hell developed a technique called stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, which uses laser beams to home in on fluorescently glowing molecules, scanning a sample nanometer by nanometer to produce a high-resolution image. For this and other achievements, Hell shared a 2014 Kavli Award.

 

Working separately, Betzig and Moerner paved the way for single-molecule microscopy, in which interspersed molecules are fluoresced on and off such that, when the same area is imaged multiple times, superimposition of the resulting images results in nanolevel resolution. Betzig first used this method in 2006.

 

Bernd Rieger of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands said the three men “opened up a huge field of research [during] the last 8 to 10 years that made it possible to study molecular interactions with a light microscope, which is the work of most cell biologists. . . . They really made a big impact.”

 

“It’s a great recognition of Stefan’s work and a lot of work that’s been done over many years,” Mark Bates, a postdoc in Hell’s lab, said of his advisor’s Nobel. “The field of super-resolution fluorescence nanoscopy [was] first conceived by Stefan and then pushed forward by a lot of different groups around the world.”

 

“This isn’t something that was done 20 years ago and has matured now. We’re all still really excited about further developing these methods and applying them to different problems in biology. . . .  These are tools that are going to push forward the fields of neurobiology, cell biology, structural biology,” said Bates. For now, though, the nanobiophotonics department is abuzz with “a lot of people, a lot of champagne, and a lot of celebratory mood.”

 

Update (October 9, 8:19 a.m.): “Over the past 10 to 15 years there has been increasing use of optical methods to look at single molecules at the nano level,” said Catherine Lewis, director of the Division of Cell Biology and Biophysics at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. “The advantage of this [approach] is that you can see the dynamics—molecules moving around, interacting with others, and where they are in the cell.”

 

Along with advances in instrumentation and fluorescent probes, as well as in computational techniques, the work of Moerner and his co-Laureates “has allowed scientists to observe and see individual single molecules in living cells in real time,” added Lewis. “I’m thrilled about this prize.”

Tags

Nobel Prize

 

 

 

 

Read More

Brain’s “Inner GPS” Wins Nobel

The Scientist » News & Opinion » Daily News               

Brain’s “Inner GPS” Wins Nobel

John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser, and Edvard Moser have won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.”

 

By Molly Sharlach and Tracy Vence | October 6, 2014

 

Left to right: John O’Keefe; May-Britt Moser, Edvard Moser

UCL, DAVID BISHOP; WIKIMEDIA, THE KAVLI INSTITUTE/NTNU

John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser, and Edvard Moser have won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.”

 

O’Keefe, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, will receive one half of this year’s prize. Husband-and-wife team May-Britt and Edvard Moser, both professors at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), will share the second half.

 

Together identifying an inner positioning system within the brain, O’Keefe is being honored for his discovery of so-called place cells, while the Mosers are recognized for their later work identifying grid cells.

 

“The discoveries of John O’Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser have solved a problem that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries,” the Nobel Foundation noted in its press release announcing the award: “How does the brain create a map of the space surrounding us and how can we navigate our way through a complex environment?”

 

Menno Witter, the Mosers’ colleague at NTNU’s Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience/Centre for Neural Computation, first met the pair in the 1990s when they were students at the University of Oslo; Witter was an assistant professor at VU University Amsterdam. 

 

Their work “is a very important contribution in terms of understanding at least part of the neural code that is generated in the brain that allows species—probably including humans—to navigate,” Witter told The Scientist. “We’re all very, very pleased, because it to us shows that what we’re doing . . . as a whole community is considered to be really important and prestigious. It is also, I think, a fabulous sign to the world that Norwegian science is really at a top level.”

 

Francesca Sargolini, a cognitive neuroscientist at Aix-Marseille University in France, worked with the Mosers when she was a postdoc. The lab had a “wonderful, stimulating atmosphere,” Sargolini told The Scientist. Discoveries made by O’Keefe and the Mosers have helped researchers understand “how the brain computes . . . information to make a representation of spaces, so we can use that information to move around in the environment and do what we do every day,” she added.

 

“This is a very well-deserved prize for John [O’Keefe] and the Mosers,” said Colin Lever, a senior lecturer in the department of psychology at Durham University in the U.K., who earned a PhD and continued postdoctoral research in O’Keefe’s lab.

 

“This is a fascinating area of research,” Lever continued. “What we’re discovering about the brain through spatial mapping is likely of greater consequence than just for understanding about space. . . . Indeed, it seems to support autobiographical memory in humans.”

 

Update (October 6, 11:57 a.m.): O’Keefe and Lynn Nadel met as graduate students at McGill University in Montreal. In 1978, when Nadel was a lecturer at University College London, the two coauthored the seminal book The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map. “We pursued the spatial map story for some years together, and we still do so separately,” Nadel, who is now a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, told The Scientist. “From my point of view, this award really recognizes the whole enterprise of looking at cognition in terms of brain function,” he added. “It’s pretty cool.”

 

Correction (October 6, 9:58 a.m.): This article has been updated to correct Witter's previous affiliation; he was at VU University Amsterdam when he first met the Mosers.

 

Read More