Boundary Settings

Cells have organs too – with the fittingly diminutive title: organelles – each with a specific structure and function. Bounding the organelles are membranes composed of fatty sheets, a lipid bilayer. With cryo-ET (electron tomography), a high-resolution imaging technique to 'see' cells' inner features, this study reveals membrane thickness varies among organelles and provides a means to analyse how this affects their function

Read the published research article here

Video from work by Desislava Glushkova, Stefanie Böhm and Martin Beck

Department of Molecular Sociology, Max Planck Institute of Biophysics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Video originally published with no restrictions – hence we publish as Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Journal of Cell Biology, November 2025

It started with a mystery: How did molten salt breach its metal container? Understanding the behavior of molten salt, a proposed coolant for next-generation nuclear reactors and fusion power, is a question of critical safety for advanced energy production. The multi-institutional research team, co-led by Penn State, initially imaged a cross-section of the sealed container, finding no clear pathway for the salt appearing on the outside. The researchers then used electron tomography, a 3D imaging technique, to reveal the tiniest of connected passages linking two sides of the solid container. That finding only led to more questions for the team investigating the strange phenomenon.

They published the answers on Feb. 22 in Nature Communications.

"Corrosion, a ubiquitous failure mode of materials, is traditionally measured in three dimensions or two dimensions, but those theories were not sufficient to explain the phenomenon in this case," said co-corresponding author Yang Yang, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics and of nuclear engineering at Penn State. He is also affiliated with the National Center for Electron Microscopy at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as well as the Materials Research Institute at Penn State. "We found that this penetrating corrosion was so localized, it only existed in one dimension -- like a wormhole."

Power of Combination

A method for combining confocal microscopy, volume scanning electron microscopy and electron tomography allows the blood-brain barrier and its leakiness to be viewed at cellular and ultrastructural scale

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Georg Kislinger and colleagues

German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Munich, Germany

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in eLife, August 2024

Morphogenesis is nature's way of building diverse structures and functions out of a fixed set of components. While nature is rich with examples of morphogenesis -- cell differentiation, embryonic development and cytoskeleton formation, for example -- research into the phenomenon in synthetic materials is scant. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers are taking a step forward using electron tomography, fluid dynamics theories and machine learning to watch soft polymers as the polymers learn from nature.

The new study, led by Qian Chen, a professor of materials science and engineering; Jie Feng, a professor of mechanical science and engineering; and Xiao Su, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering; is the first to demonstrate nanoscale morphogenesis in a synthetic material. The study is published in the journal Science Advances.

"You may see the filters in your home water purification systems as simple membranes with pores, but they are much more sophisticated when we zoom in using electron tomography," said former Illinois postdoctoral researcher Hyosung An, the study's lead author and a professor of petrochemical materials engineering at Chonnam National University in South Korea. "By capturing images of sample membranes from a rotatable stage, we can reconstruct their full 3D morphology at sub-nanometer resolution."

Structure of fossil-fuel source rocks is finally decoded

The fossil fuels that provide much of the world's energy orginate in a type of rock known as kerogen, and the potential for recovering these fuels depends crucially on the size and connectedness of the rocks' internal pore spaces.

Now, for the first time, a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere has captured three-dimensional images of kerogen's internal structure, with a level of detail more than 50 times greater than has been previously achieved. These images should allow more accurate predictions of how much oil or gas can be recovered from any given formation. This wouldn't change the capability for recovering these fuels, but it could, for example, lead to better estimates of the recoverable reserves of natural gas, which is seen as an important transition fuel as the world tries to curb the use of coal and oil.

The findings are reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, in a paper by MIT Senior Research Scientist Roland Pellenq, MIT Professor Franz-Josef Ulm, and others at MIT, CNRS and Aix-Marseille Université (AMU) in France, and Shell Technology Center in Houston.

The team, which published results two years ago on an investigation of kerogen pore structure based on computer simulations, used a relatively new method called electron tomography to produce the new 3-D images, which have a resolution of less than 1 nanometer, or billionth of a meter. Previous attempts to study kerogen structure had never imaged the material below 50 nanometers resolution, Pellenq says.