• Question: How do you take photos of sells?

    Asked by ashchn to Arthur, Clare, Daniel, David, Tora on 12 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Clare Harding

      Clare Harding answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      I use microscopes which can magnify things 100x attached to (sometimes very fancy) cameras. But to see things more clearly, i like to colour only specific proteins either red, green or blue. I have a picture on my profile if you would like to see, it means I can look at specific things within a single cell and the cells I work with are about 100x times smaller than a human cell!.

      But you can also take pictures just using your phone and a lens, here is a video showing how to do it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpMTkr_aiYU

      So you could even try it at home! Although using the colours is a bit more complicated, the microscope I used for my picture cost about £250,000!

    • Photo: Tora Smulders-Srinivasan

      Tora Smulders-Srinivasan answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      Usually we use microscopes to look at cells & these days there are digital cameras hooked up to the microscopes that very easily take pictures for us that we can easily use then on the computer.

      Though when I first started, we had to actually take physical photographs — I’m pretty old…

    • Photo: Daniel Parsons

      Daniel Parsons answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      Hi there,
      As Clare and Tora explain using a microscope and a camera is one of the best ways to image a cell.
      The best microscopes are electron microscopes that uses uses accelerated electrons as a source of light. When you magnify stuff things get darker so it is harder to see them. Because the wavelength of an electron can be up to 100,000 times shorter than that of visible light, the electron microscope has a higher magnifying power than a normal microscope and can therefore reveal the structure of smaller objects.
      There are other cool ways to image biological cells, including X-ray microscopes, which image in a different way using radio rather than light, but can be equally as revealing.

    • Photo: Arthur Dyer

      Arthur Dyer answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      Another cool way to take pictures of cells is to get a sort of glow in the dark tag that sticks to certain parts of the cell (like the pictures on my profile the green is sticking to the cell’s skeleton and the blue is sticking to the DNA)

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