DNA nanotechnology opens new path to super-high-resolution molecular imaging

A team at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University has been awarded a special $3.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop an inexpensive and easy-to-use new microscopy method to simultaneously spot many tiny components of cells.

The grant, called a Transformative Research Award, is part of an NIH initiative to fund high-risk, high-reward research, and in 2013 the agency funded just 10 of these projects nationally.

The DNA-based microscopy method could potentially lead to new ways of diagnosing disease by distinguishing healthy and diseased cells based on sophisticated molecular details. It could also help scientists uncover how the cell's components carry out their work inside the cell.

"If you want to study physiology and disease, you want to see how the molecules work, and it's important to see them in their native environments," said Peng Yin, Ph.D., a core faculty member at the Wyss Institute and Assistant Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School.

Biologists have used microscopes to reveal how tiny structures inside cells prop them up and help them move, reproduce, activate genes, and much more. But although microscope makers have honed the technology for centuries to get ever-clearer images, they have been limited by the laws of physics. When two objects are closer than about 0.2 micrometers, or about one five-hundredth the width of a human hair, the scientists can no longer distinguish them using traditional light microscopes.