Subramaniam Sriram
Laboratory of Cell Biology, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
Curr Opin Microbiol. 2005 Jun;8(3):316-22. doi: 10.1016/j.mib.2005.04.012.
Transmission electron microscopy is a powerful tool that is used to explore the internal structure of tissues, cells, organelles and macromolecular complexes. By integrating data from a series of images in which the orientation of the specimen is progressively varied relative to the incident electron beam it is also possible to extend electron microscopic imaging into the third dimension. This approach, commonly referred to as electron tomography, has been greatly aided in recent years by advances in technology for imaging specimens at cryogenic temperatures, as well as by substantial progress in procedures for automated data collection and image processing. The intense pace of developments in this field is inspired, in a large part, by the hope that the quality of the data will ultimately be good enough to allow interpretation of tomograms of cells, organelles, bacteria and viruses in terms of the three-dimensional spatial arrangements of the constituent molecules.
透射电子显微镜是一种强大的工具，用于探索组织、细胞、细胞器和大分子复合物的内部结构。通过整合一系列图像的数据，在这些图像中样本相对于入射电子束的取向逐渐变化，也可以将电子显微镜成像扩展到三维空间。这种方法通常称为电子断层扫描，近年来，低温下样本成像技术的进步以及自动数据收集和图像处理程序的重大进展极大地推动了该方法的发展。该领域的快速发展在很大程度上受到这样一种希望的激励，即最终数据质量将足够好，以便能够根据组成分子的三维空间排列来解释细胞、细胞器、细菌和病毒的断层图像。
