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Wisconsin’s has its very own particle accelerator, the UW-Madison Synchrotron Radiation Center in Stoughton, which is used by scientists from throughout the Midwest. That’s pretty neat, but here’s something neater:  UW-Milwaukee scientists have worked with others to create a powerful new microscope capable of quickly and accurately determining the molecular composition of tissue samples – making it almost as powerful, say, as a Star Trek tricorder.

The device uses a dozen beams of powerful light created at the Center, where electrons are accelerated to near the speed of light in a ring-shaped tube called an “aladdin.” The high energy light, by virtue of crossing many wavelengths, collects massive of amounts of information for scientists.

tissue imaging using old (left) and the new (right) synchrotron microscopes (photo by uwm)

The microscope doesn’t just produce an image of the sample, be it a piece of tissue or something non-biological, it also determines its molecular and chemical makeup. In preliminary tests, the microscope was able to distinguish between different types of cells – distinctions that are important to cancer researchers – in breast and prostate tissue samples.

The IRENI imaging device is the most accurate of its kind yet constructed. Past attempts using only a single beam produced blurry images.

Other applications, according to a UWM news release, include pharmaceutical drug analysis, art conservation, forensics, biofuels and nanomaterials.

The team’s research appears in the Nature Methods journal.

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