All these bits are way smaller than light can resolve, so the people doing this need signal processing, and they are not EEs.
It's a twelve year old exercise in molecular modelling. The molecular structures were originally sorted out by X-ray diffaction. X-rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation, and can be a seen as a sort of very short-wavelength light which actually can resolve the separate atoms involved.
The people doing the work are molecular biologists, and not EE's which is the one point that John Larkin has got right.
The signal processing - such as it is - happens on big computers, and the process of sequencing proteins is fairly computer intensive, but calling it signal processing is a long stretch. There aren't any finite impulse response filters involved.
When I was first working in the UK one of my acquaintances from Melbourne was doing a post-doc at Max Perutz's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge where he'd worked out the structure of haemoglobin a few years earlier. She's now a professor of Molecular Biology back in Melbourne and got some kind of gong (government awarded honour) last year.
The clip predates Google's solving the protein folding problem. This article is from 2022. That was a much cooler trick.
Yes. One can resolve the location of the centroid of a glowing blob of light to a tiny fraction of the wavelength of light. It's a cool trick.
Needs electronics!
Fluorescence microscopy is just conventional microscopy. Confocal microscopes do have advantages but nothing dramatic
There are some weird trick you can play - like two-photon excitation - which can push up the resolution appreciably.
Stefan Hell takes this even further. "The basic principles and standard implementations of STED (stimulated emission depletion) and RESOLFT (reversible saturable/switchable optical linear (fluorescence) transitions) microscopy" are very weird indeed.
Since this all post-dates the youtube presentation that John Larkin posted a link to, it's not relevant to it, though it does seem to be able to validate the original computer modelling. To some extent the development of this kind of hardware is driven by the ambition to see what we had already worked out had to be happening at that scale.
That's probably not a good description of what's going on. It's more setting up the excitation so that fluorescence can only be stimulated inside a very small volume. The molecules involved have a nasty habit of coming to pieces if they see too many excitation photons.
Single molecule fluoresence microscopy tends to kill off the molecule after a few excitations.
It certainly uses quite a lot of electronics, some of it developed by physicists.
There's no chance element in refining an instrument to let you see what you expect to see. It gets interesting when it lets you see something unexpected, but that doesn't seem to have happened yet. It would be worth posting here when it did.
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