Nobel round-up

In case you missed them, here is Laboratory News’ round-up of who won what in this year’s Nobel Prize announcements. Each prize is worth 8 million SEK (£0.7 million), and is shared equally among winners, except in the Medicine of Physiology prize where O’Keefe was awarded half, and the Mosers half. Physiology or Medicine The inner GPS of the brain, which makes it possible for us to orient ourselves in space has won John O’Keefe, and husband and wife team May-Britt and Edvard Moser this year’s prize. In 1971 at University College London, O’Keefe discovered the first component of this internal positioning system – a nerve cell in the hippocampus that was always activated when a rat was in a certain place in a room. Other nerve cells were activated when the rodent was in a different part of the room, leading O’Keefe to suggest these ‘place cells’ formed a map of the room. In 2005, the Mosers discovered another key component of the system – a nerve cell which they called grid cells. These cells generate a coordinated system and allow for precise positioning and pathfinding. The Norwegian pair noticed certain cells were activated when the rat passed multiple locations arranged in a hexagonal grid – each of these cells activated a unique spatial pattern which collectively constituted a coordinated system allowing for spatial navigation. Together with other cells in the entorhinal cortex, these grid cells recognise the direction of the head and border of the room to form networks with the place cells in the hippocampus. This circuitry constitutes a comprehensive positioning system in the brain. Physics The invention of the blue light-emitting diodes won this year’s Physics prize. Twenty years ago, Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura produced bright light beams from semiconductors, triggering a fundamental transformation in lighting technology. Where incandescent bulbs lit the 20^th century, the 21^st century would be illuminated by LED lamps. Blue LEDs are based on the wide band gap semiconductors GaN (gallium nitride) and InGaN (indium gallium nitride) and are added to existing red and green LEDs to produce the impression of white light. LED lamps offer a great benefit to mankind, holding great promise for increasing the quality of life for people around the world who lack access to electricity grids. These lamps emit a bright white light, are long-lasting and energy-efficient. LEDs consists of a number of layered semiconductor materials. In the LED, electricity is directly converted into light particles, photons, leading to efficiency gains compared to other light sources where most of the electricity is converted to heat and only a small amount into light. They will contribute to saving the world’s resources; LEDs last up to 100,000 hours, compared to 1,000 for incandescent bulbs. Importantly, they also contain no mercury. Chemistry Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner won the Chemistry Prize for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy, which allows scientists to study living cells – red blood cells, bacteria and yeast – and their processes in real time. It was assumed that optical microscopy could never improve on obtaining a better resolution than 0.2 micrometers but this year’s laureates circumvented this limitation with the help of fluorescent molecules. The prize is awarded for two separate principles. The first enables the method stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, developed by Hell in 2000. The technique uses two laser beams – one stimulates fluorescent molecules to glow, the other cancels all fluorescence out, except that in the mamometre-sized volume. Scanning the sample, nanometre by nanometre, results in an incredibly high resolution image. Betzig and Moerner – working separately – laid the foundation for single molecule microscopy, which relies on the possibility to turn the fluorescence of individual molecules on and off. Scientists image the same area multiple times, letting just a few interspersed molecules glow each time. Superimposing these images gives a dense super-image resolved at the nanolevel.