SCIENTISTS ARE using bullet-time photography and body scanner-like tomography to peer deeper and deeper into the workings of cells, providing a visual alternative to the indirect methods that biologists have traditionally used to work out how DNA and proteins behave in living systems. Professor Wolfgang Baumeister of the Max Planck Institute in Germany is using a technique called cryo-electron tomography - a combination of electron microscopy and computer-based reconstruction - to build 3D images of cells that resolve almost to the atomic level. His aim is to build a "molecular atlas", he told delegates at the recent International Conference on Systems Biology in Gothenburg.
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