Chromatin, the stuff that chromosomes are made of and that plays a role in activating different genes, undergoes structural changes when a cell goes rogue, as a bunch of genes have to be expressed that weren’t activated when the cell was still healthy.
Detecting these changes has been the work of researchers at Northwestern University, where a microscope based on a concept called Partial Wave Spectroscopy (PWS) has been built to be able to peer into a cell and detect that chromatin’s structure is changing.
Changes in chromatin packing, or the structure that chromatin undertakes, are hard to spot because they are often very small, anywhere from about two to 200 nanometers.
Conventional microscopy doesn’t do so well at this scale, and so the structure of chromatin is hard to see. But, you don’t need to see the exact structure to find out if it’s changing, and that’s what the PWS microscope is able to accomplish.
While there’s certainly exciting clinical applications for this technology, we hope that it will serve more to explain how and why individual cells turn cancerous, perhaps helping humanity prevent the disease in the first place.