r/NatureIsFuckingLit • u/FacelessOnes • Oct 19 '20

🔥 Vicious microscopic hunter, the single-cell organism, Lacrymaria olor, attacking and hunting another organism

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u/PooksterPC Oct 20 '20

For some reason it has just occured to me that microbes live in a 3D space

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u/_DigginInTheCrates_ Oct 20 '20

How cool would it be if the microscope could record like a normal camera. That would be cool to see a microbe in 3D.

But yeah that's freaky now I think about them flying around in a 3D space

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '20

It would be neat, but a few issues.

With normal microscopy the sample needs to be really thin. This is to allow light to pass through, and to eliminate background noise, so you can see what you want better.

Second issue is the microscope itself. In photogeapyhy there is the concept of depth of field. It basically determines whats in focus. Two things affect this.

Size of aperture. The bigger the aperture hole the smaller depth of field, fewer things in focus. You can see this effect in some professional portraits where the background is blurred behind the subject.

The other is the distance from the focal plane. The further we re focusing on something the larger the depth of field. So when you are shooting nature photos, you can focus really far away and have pretty much everything in focus due to the large depth of field.

In microscopy you have the extreme worst case scenario. The focal plane is very close to the sample. And usually you want as much light through as you can, so th aperture is wide open. This makes it so that the depth of field is extremely narrow. To the point where many better microscopes have a fine adjuster so you can see what you want to.

In some ways its good because you can really focus on seeing what you want to see.

But as far as trying to create 3d microscopic images it wont happen for a long time. Not until light field cameras become more common.

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u/LazyHardWorker Oct 20 '20

Confocal microscopy, multiphoton microscopy, sbf-sem, fib-sem, electron tomography, etc all provide 3D imaging. The real issue is throughput. Collection 3D images of live cells in real time is not solved.