Imaging is everything

摘要

Enrico Gratton gave his research centre an aspirational and prescient name: the Laboratory for Fluorescence Dynamics. When the lab was established at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1986, Gratton and his colleagues could make lipids and proteins in clumps of cells glimmer using fluorescent probes, but imaging moving molecules in individual cells was impossible. Yet Gratton had hope: "We put 'dynamics' in the centre's name because we knew we wanted to eventually follow the behaviour of molecules inside individual cells," he says. With technological advances, Gratton can now do just that at the lab, which moved to the University of California, Irvine, in 2006. He can watch lipids aggregate and proteins exit membranes. His dream has been realized.