Many technologies have been developed with the goal of analyzing living systems in action at the molecular level. But they are often thwarted by the lack of visual details distinguishing the various molecules, or they destroy the cells in the process.
A new technology developed by researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital sidesteps these problems. Called scission-accelerated fluorophore exchange (SAFE), the method uses various immunofluorescence tags attached to molecules on living cells, paired with uniquely fast yet exceptionally gentle chemical reactions to remove the tags.
