The latest approaches in electron microscopy can produce images of three-dimensional volumes of a sample, showing cells and details of the molecules within them. Cancers are essentially malfunctioning cells so imaging at this scale is proving invaluable both for detailed diagnoses and for research. For example, electron microscopy images show sites on proteins to which drug molecules might bind. Such binding can disrupt the function of proteins that play a part in cancer.

Latest electron microscopes show tumour cells in the context of the cells around them, enabling scientist to study the interaction between cancers and healthy cells. This helps in understanding how cancers persuade healthy cells to support them, for example, encouraging the growth of blood vessels to supply tumours.

The EMBL Imaging Centre makes the latest electron microscopy technologies available to researchers worldwide for research on cancer and a great many other areas of biology.

Various imaging technologies using electron microscopes generate large volumes of data. Some techniques image numerous slices through a sample. Others take many images of different instances of the same molecules before combining them to produce a clearer picture of the molecule than any one of the single images. Much of this output is archived in open data libraries such as the Electron Microscopy Public Image Archive (EMPIAR) run by EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). Here, data is catalogued and managed to enable researchers worldwide to access it.

Electron microscopes have imaged things smaller and more fleeting than previous thought possible. Scientists at EMBL and at the Zentrum für Infektiologie at Heidelberg University Hospital captured a particle of HIV virus passing through a pore to enter the cell nucleus where it will highjack the cell’s internal mechanisms to reproduce and spread.

Biology has been a key driver in the development of electron microscopes, but they are also applied in other areas, such as material science, where they determine the composition of materials. In archaeology, electron microscopes have f.e. revealed weevils in Roman era grain, the composition of Roman coins and the burial of an Iron Age warrior on a sheep’s fleece that had long since rotted away.