Nanoparticles can help scientists brighten their research—but they also can throw off microsco

Nanoparticles can help scientists brighten their research—but they also can throw off microscopic measurementsGold nanoparticles brighten the fluorescent dyes researchers use to highlight and study proteins, bacteria and other cells, but the nanoparticles also introduce an artifact that makes the dye appear removed from the target it’s illuminating.Now, a University of Michigan team has determined how to account for the discrepancy between where the fluorescent dye appears to be and where its actual position is.When researchers want to understand how proteins interact with each other, how bacteria function or how cells grow and divide, they often use fluorescent dyes. This microscopy approach can be further enhanced with nanoparticles. But an artifact introduced by the nanoparticles makes the dye appear in the microscope as far as 100 nanometers removed from the proteinor bacteria to which it is directly bound.This “scooching effect” presents a problem: 100 nanometers may seem like an infinitesimal measurement, but if a protein is itself only a nanometer in length, a researcher might not be able to tell whether a protein is interacting with another protein or just gazing at it from the equivalent of the opposite end of a football field.Read more. -- source link

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