Crystal ball - 2013

A high-resolution 3D ‘peek’ into microbial community life Manfred Auer, Life Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, MS Donner, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. Microbial community architecture has long been the domain of scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Transmission electron microscopy, on the other hand, while allowing for exquisite sample preservation (McDonald and Auer, ; Palsdottir et al., ), can only cover a tiny sliver of the 3D volume, and the attempt to reconstruct a 3D volume from serial sections has its own challenges, including finding the exact same area to image for different sections and for every grid, as well as compensating for the unique mechanical deformations of each section, making it difficult to unambiguously reconstruct a serial section 3D volume. SEE PDF] To be sure, plenty of obstacles remain to be tackled, such as sufficient access to the very expensive 3D imaging equipment, the sheer visualization of such large and highly complex volumes, as well as the need to develop user-guided and/or (semi)-automated approaches for extracting features of interest, easy 3D volume annotation and quantitative 3D geometrical analysis, and ultimately the translation of data voxels into semantic information.