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Super-resolution microscopes reveal new details of cells and disease


Advanced light microscopy techniques have come into their own — and are giving scientists a new understanding of human biology and what goes wrong in disease

“We can really see new biology — things that we were hoping to see but hadn’t seen before,” says molecular cell biologist Lothar Schermelleh, who directs an imaging center at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Earlier in 2025, biophysicist Melike Lakadamyali of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues discovered that organelles called lysosomes, whose textbook role is to break down waste material in cells, can have different combinations of proteins on their surfaces. Last year, Lippincott-Schwartz learned that mutations in the VAPB gene, which is believed to contribute to the nerve-killing disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis(ALS), may interfere with the ability of the endoplasmic reticulum to connect to mitochondria, she says.

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