Question: How powerful is your microscope

Isabel Pires answered on 9 Mar 2015:

In my Department we have all sorts of microscopes, for all tastes and sizes. 🙂

Some of the most simpler microscopes allow us to look at samples (such as live cancer cells or details of cells in a section of a leaf, for example) by making them look 4x to 40x bigger.

Other microscopes are quite sophisticated and use LED lights or even lasers to get really clear images of the various parts of a cell, after we have labelled them with fluorescence markers that you can’t see in normal circumstances. These microscopes can make samples look up to 100X bigger, allowing us to look at details which are 100-1000x smaller that a millimetre. Details like these could be the nucleus of a cell, mitochondria, etc.

But some of our most sophisticated microscopes are even more powerful and allow us to look at parts of cells and molecules as small as one millionth of a millimetre! Using these we can look at single molecules of DNA, really small vesicles in a cell and the detail of the cell’s membranes.