GLIMmer of Life
This brightly coloured ball is a cow embryo, except it’s not…not really. Like many microscopy pictures, this is a reconstruction of how light falls on something tiny. Sometimes though, pictures from inside living tissue can be fuzzy, because light bounces around inside creating a sort of ‘cloud’. Here, gradient light interference microscopy (GLIM) aims gentle pulses of laser light at different depths in the embryo, piecing together a set of pictures into a detailed 3D model. Researchers sliced the top off this virtual embryo so they can peer inside at the earliest stages of life, spotting any problems. GLIM could be a gentle and safe way for predicting which human embryos are most suitable for in vitro fertilisation, raising the chance of conceiving for millions of hopeful couples.
Written by John Ankers
- Image courtesy of Gabriel Popescu
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA
- Image copyright held by the original authors
- Published in Nature Communications, August 2017
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