Patrick Loll <pat.l...@drexel.edu> writes: > I just read an appalling article in the science section of today's NY Times > that refers to a new magnetic resonance force microscope developed at IBM. The > story states "For the first time, researchers at an IBM laboratory have > captured a three-dimensional image of a virus."
They might have thought of a 3D image of a _single_ virus - that would explain the oblique reference to Electron Microscopy in the article "But these techniques are more destructive of biological samples because they send a stream of electrons at the target in order to get an image" (though the article refers to STM and AFM, for which this is not true). Good EM tomograms of single viruses have been around for a few years now (and much much longer using icosahedral reconstruction), e.g. http://www.ebi.ac.uk/msd-srv/emsearch/atlas/1155_visualization.html > The same article states that this instrument can be used to "...look at the > proteins that make up the basic DNA structure...[sic]". Sigh. That's funny, this is already corrected in the online version http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/science/13mri.html?ref=science -Christoph PS: The article was written by their Silicon Valley correspondent - bad luck for IBM Research that they are, after all, a computer company. -- | Christoph Best <b...@ebi.ac.uk> http://www.ebi.ac.uk/~best | European Bioinformatics Institute, Cambridge, UK +44-1223-492649
