It looks like the scientists who work on seeing small things may have hit the bottom of the turtle stack (“It’s turtles all the way down, doctor!”):
A Cryo-EM map of the protein apoferritin. Credit: Paul Emsley/MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (via nature)
A game-changing technique for imaging molecules known as cryo-electron microscopy has produced its sharpest pictures yet — and, for the first time, discerned individual atoms in a protein.
By achieving atomic resolution using cryogenic-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), researchers will be able to understand, in unprecedented detail, the workings of proteins that cannot easily be examined by other imaging techniques, such as X-ray crystallography. [Nature]
Those blobs, above, are individual atoms on the surface of a protein.
OK, so, thinking about it, there is one more turtle to go – visualizing quarks. An electron is a quark, for example. They’re the bits of reality that are really indivisible, as I understand it.
But this is – pun intended – really cool.
