Institut Pasteur acquires world's most powerful microscope



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The Institut Pasteur has just acquired a microscope with extraordinary capabilities. Titan Krios, this microscope will visualize all the details of viruses, cell components, or protein complexes.

Hard to imagine that the high cabinet of more than 4 meters that found room in the premises of the Institut Pasteur in Paris is actually a … microscope! More precisely, an electronic cryo-microscope that gives researchers a vision at the atomic scale, which allows them to distinguish many details that would remain invisible with a conventional electron microscope.

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 melanome_microscope [19659005] Cryo-electron microscopy is a technique involving the cooling of a sample to a cryogenic temperature (below -180 ° C), which allows researchers to obtain 3D images of proteins <strong> and viruses </strong> impossible to obtain by another method </p>
<h2 clbad= Housed in a building built for him

The Institut Pasteur took up a real challenge to install this microscope named Titan Krios, in an urban setting. It was indeed necessary to build a dedicated building taking into account a number of constraints: electromagnetic fields, temperature, moisture content, vibration and constant nitrogen source.

The giant microscope will save considerable time researchers and allow them to study the most fragile elements, frozen in their cellular environment. Specialists from different disciplines (immunology, bacteriology, virology, parasitology …) will thus be able to understand the structure of viruses or proteins in order to develop strategies for the treatment of the diseases for which they are responsible. [19659008Remainsanotherchallenge:storingalltheinformationcollected! "The challenge is to be able to keep all this data so that any specialist in France can dig into this wonderful visual library which, I hope, will allow scientists to discover new cellular and molecular processes, and to lift the veil on an unexplored part of life " underlines Michael Nilges, director of the Department of Structural Biology and Chemistry at the Pasteur Institute.

To read also:

Investigation of dangerous viruses at the Institut Pasteur

Pasteurdon: a decade of discoveries thanks to donations

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