New Frontier Research – Health article by Horizon Magazine on a video at nanometre resolution -first time ever-, where scientists filmed how the immune system kills bacteria by poking holes into it. Professor Georg Fantner tells about how this was achieved and why his next challenge is to build a video camera that can film the inside of a living cell. “We want to watch what is going on at the nanoscale inside living cells, which has never been done. You can’t use a normal optical microscope to do this because photons (or the wavelength of light) are too big: in essence, we are blind. So instead of trying to see something with light, we try to feel the surface – like a blind person using a stick”.
This video shows the body’s immune system attacking a bacterial membrane. It punches one hole in the surface before pausing and then punching more. Video source – nature communications ( DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10058-7)