Question: do you use a electron microscope

Claire Donald answered on 16 Jun 2018:

Hey Floppywhaleshark! Sadly no I don’t. They are pretty cool pieces of kit and give very fancy images. They are very useful to take detailed pictures of bacteria or viruses inside cells. My department recently got a very large grant to buy a ‘state of the art’ electron microscope which costs £1,000,000s. I would be too scared to use it in case I broke it!

Mostly I use a much less sophisticated kind of microscope called a florescent microscope. If I make a virus that can fluoresce with different colours, I can follow it inside cells and see where it goes and what it does. The pictures can be pretty with all the florescent colours but are much less detailed than with an electron microscope.

I also need to use a different microscope for mosquito dissections. These microscopes just use normal light and magnify the view of the mosquito. No way I could dissect mosquito salivary glands without it!