Discovery of a Nuclear Structure in UVC-induced Apoptotic Cells by Integrated Laser Electron Microscopy

Electron microscopy has the great advantage to analyse cellular interactions at high resolution. In addition, subcellular structures and organelles can directly be seen, unequivocally identified and correlated with the labelled proteins. Labelling and localisation studies are easy and straightforward for simple, uniform samples e.g., culture cells [1, 2]. In complex tissue, however, finding the labelled area of single events becomes cumbersome [3, 4]. Gold labels can only be seen at rather high magnifications of 15.000 to 20.000 times, where only parts of a cell are in the field of view. To find a few gold particles on an electron microscopy grid is comparable to find a few coins in a soccer field.