Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
While scanning electron microscopes (SEM) can provide scientists with extremely detailed images of biological specimens, thus far they have not been able to work on living organisms because the powerful vacuum environment required would cause them to explode.
Now, however, researchers from the Hamamatsu University School of Medicine in Japan have come up with an innovative solution to the problem: miniature spacesuits made from a substance that can keep mosquitoes and other insects alive without interfering with the imaging process.
According to LiveScience, an SEM creates images by scanning a specimen with a focused beam of electrons and is used to analyze the structure or composition of those biological samples. They are said to be powerful enough to produce images of features just billionths of a meter wide.
Yet, in order to keep the electrons in the beam from scattering, the microscopes have to be used in a vacuum, the website noted. Considering that most creatures are comprised primarily of water, which evaporates in a vacuum, using SEMs to study living beings has been impossible.
NanoSuits to the rescue!
The process has traditionally required that specimens first be killed and dehydrated. By coating insects in a thin, flexible membrane known as a “NanoSuit,” however, the study authors have made it possible to use this cutting-edge imaging technology on living creatures.
Takahiko Hariyama, a biologist at the university and lead author of the paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, explained that the thickness of the material is just 50 to 100 nanometers (roughly one-thousand the width of a human hair) but said that it covers each organism’s entire body.
Hariyama, who has been working on the NanoSuit technology for nearly two years, and his colleagues reported in their study that adding a thin layer of the material could keep organisms alive in the high vacuum conditions of the SEM. Furthermore, at optimum condition, a layer of the material would not impact the imaging or the creature’s surface in any way.
“We also found that electrostatic charging was absent as long as the organisms were alive, even if they had not been coated with electrically conducting materials,” the study authors wrote. “This result suggests that living organisms possess their own electrical conductors and/or rely on certain properties of the surface to inhibit charging.”
“The NanoSuit seems to prolong the charge-free condition and increase survival time under vacuum,” they continued, adding that their findings “should encourage the development of more sophisticated observation methods for studying living organisms” using field emission SEMs.
Using the NanoSuit, Hariyama and his colleagues were able to image the Culex pipiens molestus or London Underground mosquito, a species of shining leaf beetle (Lilioceris merdigera), and the Talitrus saltator (a crustacean that lives on beaches).
Hariyama told the website that it was easy to get the insects into the NanoSuits. First, they took each of the bugs and dipped them in a diluted surfactant, a substance desired to prepare them for the SEM imaging process. The material was hard on the outside and soft on the inside, and could repair itself is the surfaces if the NanoSuit was broken by the insect’s movements, he added.
Once the suit was applied, the scientists were able to shine the plasma beam on the creature, capturing detailed images without killing them in the process. Nearly all of the test subjects were able to survive the process, the authors noted. In future studies, they plan to analyze the insects’ DNA after the imaging process to see if the NanoSuits caused any lasting health problems.
What’s next for the world’s tiniest spacesuits? We’re hoping space, of course.
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