Inside a Cell: Focused Ion Beam Scanning Electron Microscopy

Combining focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM), a technology originally developed to inspect details in semiconductor manufacturing, with machine learning techniques to interpret the mass of data produced by scanning, researchers report in a Nature paper, “Whole-cell organelle segmentation in volume electron microscopy” that they are able to identify the tightly-packed organelles inside a single cell. The full paper is behind the Nature paywall and no buccaneer has yet jailbroken it and put it on Sci-Hub, but Derek Lowe has written a summary of the work and its implications at Scientific American, “The Inside of the Cell”.

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