If you’ve ever wanted to watch a killer T cell in action, or see human cancer make new cells up-close, now is your chance.

A collection of 3-D movies captured by Duke biology professor Dan Kiehart and colleagues has won the 2015 Newcomb Cleveland Prize for most outstanding paper in the journal Science.

The paper uses a new imaging technique called lattice light-sheet microscopy to make super high-resolution three-dimensional movies of living things ranging from single cells to developing worm and fly embryos.

Cutting-edge microscopes available on many campuses today allow researchers to take one or two images a second. But the lattice light-sheet microscope, co-developed by 2014 Nobel Prize winner Eric Betzig, lets researchers take more than 50 images a second, and in the specimen’s natural state, without smooshing it under a cover slip.

You can watch slender antennae called filopodia extend from the surface of a human cancer cell, or tiny rods called microtubules, several thousand times finer than a human hair, growing and shrinking inside a slide mold.

Daniel Kiehart and former Duke postdoctoral fellow Serdar Tulu made a video of the back side of a fruit fly embryo during a crucial step in its development into a larva.

Chosen from among nominations submitted by readers of Science, the paper has been viewed more than 20,000 times since it was first published on October 24, 2014.

The award was announced on February 12, 2016, at an award ceremony held during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, D.C.

Winners received a commemorative plaque and $25,000, to be shared among the paper’s lead authors Eric Betzig, Bi-Chang Chen, Wesley Legant and Kai Wang of Janelia Farm Research Campus.

Read more: “Lattice light-sheet microscopy: Imaging molecules to embryos at high spatiotemporal resolution,” Chen, B.-C., et al. Science, October 2014. DOI:10.1126/science.1257998

 

Post by Robin A. Smith Robin Smith