Publishing in Nature, Stanford researcher Steven Block has produced an amazing new tool for the nanoscale, accurate down to one angstrom, or one-tenth of a nanometer. From the detailed press release: ” ‘This technical achievement will no doubt lead to new information about the molecular machinery that carries out basic cellular processes, particularly those related to replication, transcription and translation,’ adds Catherine Lewis, a program director in biophysics at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS).
” ‘If I look in my crystal ball and see where this is going, I think this blows open the field of single-molecule biophysics,’ Block says. ‘We have achieved a resolution for a single molecule comparable to what a crystallographer typically achieves in a millimeter-sized crystal, which has 1,000 trillion molecules in it. Not only are we doing all this with one molecule at one-angstrom resolution, we’re doing it in real time while the molecule is moving at room temperature in an aqueous solution.’ ” (Source: Betterhumans)
