DHAKA: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has declared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this year to Eric Betzig, Stefan W Hell and William E Moerner ‘for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy’.

Eric Betzig works at Janelia Farm Research Campus and William E. Moerner at Stanford University in USA and Stefan W Hell at Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry and Cancer Research Center in Germany, says the Academy release on Wednesday.

According to the release, for a long time optical microscopy was held back by a presumed limitation: that it would never obtain a better resolution than half the wavelength of light.

Helped by fluorescent molecules the Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 2014 ingeniously circumvented this limitation. Their ground-breaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension.

In what has become known as nanoscopy, scientists visualize the pathways of individual molecules inside living cells.

They can see how molecules create synapses between nerve cells in the brain; they can track proteins involved in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases as they aggregate; they follow individual proteins in fertilized eggs as these divide into embryos.

It was all but obvious that scientists should ever be able to study living cells in the tiniest molecular detail.

In 1873, the microscopist Ernst Abbe stipulated a physical limit for the maximum resolution of traditional optical microscopy: it could never become better than 0.2 micrometres. Eric Betzig, Stefan W Hell and William E Moerner are awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014 for having bypassed this limit.

Due to their achievements the optical microscope can now peer into the nanoworld.

BDST: 1616 HRS, OCT 08, 2014