Microscopy

Seeing in super-resolution

January 20, 2023

Portrait of Ke Xu in the lab. (Photo by Elena Zhukova)

Ke Xu, Associate Professor of Chemistry, is a 2021 Heising-Simons Faculty Fellow. (Photo by Elena Zhukova)

What do the smallest building blocks of life look like? How do molecules dance and dart and drift through cells, fold and fuse and form the machinery of living things? For...

Big data at the atomic scale: new detector reaches new frontier in speed

February 21, 2019
Advances in electron microscopy have opened up a new window into the nanoscale world and brought a wide range of samples into focus as never before.

New microscope technology energizes undergraduate research

March 14, 2022

Zeiss microscope

Chemistry senior Nadia Berndt prepares scans for her investigation of charge dynamics in clay encapsulated 2D materials. Photo: Michael Barnes

The College of Chemistry has received a new state-of-the-art EVO LS 15 scanning electron microscope (SEM) provided by ZEISS in support of the instructional physical chemistry labs. The new SEM will allow our students to take images of...

Super-resolution microscopy reveals fine detail of cellular mesh

January 30, 2018

Ke Xu. Photo by KaltschmidtIn the current issue of the journal Cell Reports, Ke Xu and his colleagues at UC Berkeley use the technique to provide a sharp view of the geodesic mesh that supports the outer membrane of a red blood cell, revealing why such cells are sturdy yet flexible enough to squeeze through narrow capillaries as they carry oxygen to our tissues.