Microscope breakthrough wins Nobel Prize in Chemistry

THREE scientists who revolutionised microscopy have shared this year’s Nobel prize for chemistry.

Eric Betzig, William Moerner and Stefan Hell were named this year’s winners for their co development of “super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”.
Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell and William Moerner used fluorescence to extend the limits of the light microscope.
   The winners will share prize money of eight million kronor (£0.7m). They will receive their award on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of prize creator Alfred Nobel.
They were named at a press conference in Sweden, and join a prestigious list of 105 other Chemistry laureates recognised since 1901.
  According to Nobel Committee researchers had won the award for "the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy".
  Profs Betzig and Moerner are US citizens, while Prof Hell is German.
Committee chair Prof Sven Lidin, a materials chemist from Lunds University, said "the work of the laureates has made it possible to study molecular processes in real time".
   US-based Dr Betzig and Professor Moerner are with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Stanford University respectively. Professor Hell is based at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany.

“recently prize is about how the optical microscope change to nanoscope,” said Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, where the announcement took place.

Swedish scientist Sven Lidin, who chairs the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, joked about the grainy images of the laureates on the academy’s screen. “Could somebody please do something about the resolution,” he asked. “That’s a question that microscopists have asked for many years.”

He told that conventional microscopes tried to visulize objects smaller than the width of a human hair. “Many biochemistry expriment and research on smaller object".

According to Professor Lidin there was very high resolution of electron microscopy but it will never give information about living cells.

He said the three scientists had broken through these limits in two different ways, with Professor Hell developing “simulated emission depletion microscopy” and his two counterparts laying the foundations for “single fluorophore microscopy”.

“The work of the laureates has made it possible to study molecular processes in real time. It’s been used to study the dynamics of transcription and translation — that is, the reading of DNA and the transference from that to proteins.

“It’s enabled us to look at how proteins associated with disease aggregate, for example in Alzheimer’s, Huntingdon’s and Parkinson’s diseases. It’s even shown us the structural dynamic changes to neurons in the brain during learning processes.”

Australia has only won the chemistry award only once — in 1975, when Australian-born John Cornforth shared the prize with Switzerland’s Vladimir Prelog for their work on “the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalysed reactions”.

“This subject is difficult to explain,” the academy admitted at the time. Professor Cornforth died late last year, aged 96.

Australia boasts eight Nobel laureates in physiology and four in physics, reflecting the country’s research strengths in those disciplines. Patrick White claimed the 1973 prize for literature, and Australian-educated John Harsanyi shared the 1994 prize for economics.

Three Nobel prizes remain to be announced this year, after the winners of the prizes for physiology and physics were revealed earlier this week. The literature laureate will be announced late Thursday night Australian time, followed by peace on Friday and economics on Monday.

The night proved a disappointment for three Australian chemists who had been tipped as potential winners by analysts Thomson Reuters. Graeme Moad, Ezio Rizzardo and San Thang, of CSIRO, were dubbed likely contenders for their 1998 invention of a technology called “reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer”.

The process, dubbed “living polymerisation” because it can be stopped and restarted at any time, is now used by at least 60 companies worldwide and has spawned some 600 patents.

2013 - Michael Levitt, Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel shared the prize, for devising computer simulations of chemical processes.
2012 - Work that revealed how protein receptors pass signals between living cells and the environment won the prize for Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka.
2011 - Dan Schechtman received the prize for discovering the "impossible" structure of quasicrystals.
2010 - Richard Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki were recognised for developing new ways of linking carbon atoms together.
2009 - Discovering the structure and function of our cells' "protein factories", earned the chemistry Nobel for Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath