Imaging with isotopes: high resolution and quantitation

nothing so small as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding.” Thus wrote Robert Hooke in his pioneering work Micrographia [1] published by the Royal Society in 1664. In this revolutionary book, Hooke described with excitement his discoveries using a simple light microscope, coining the word ‘cell’ to define the microscopic structures he saw in cork and plant samples. In this issue of Journal of Biology [2], Claude Lechene and colleagues describe a 21st century microscopy technology (Figure 1) that also reveals images we have never seen before. Hooke was fascinated by the new vision of the world and the planets afforded by the lenses of the early light microscopes and telescopes of the 17th century. Ever since these discoveries, researchers have been gazing at the microscopic world and developing better and better instruments to do so. Over the centuries, the demanding needs of biologists have fuelled countless improvements in imaging technologies. For example, electron microscopy has become a standard instrument for high-resolution imaging (in the nanometer range) in biology, and scanning probe microscopy techniques provide three-dimensional images of atomic surfaces.