• Question: what is the smallest thing you have ever seen

    Asked by 294susb52 to Samuel on 9 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Samuel Ellis

      Samuel Ellis answered on 9 Mar 2015:


      Well you see lots of small things with microscopy. At the moment I am using fluorescence microscopy a lot, where you stain different parts of a cell to ‘glow’ different colours. This way you can highlight individual sections like the nucleus or components of the cell membrane.

      I used to work with tiny parasites called trypanosomes, which look like worms but are much much smaller than the human cells in your blood. The cool thing with them was that the best way to check if they were alive in a sample was to watch them wiggling with the microscope!

      Electron microscopy allows you to see even tinier details, using beams of electrons instead of light. There is an example image on my profile of some bacteria stuck to real human gut lining from a patient.

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