X-ray tomography on a living frog embryo
Thursday, May 16, 2013 - 10:01
in Physics & Chemistry
Classical X-ray radiographs provide information about internal, absorptive structures of organisms such as bones. Alternatively, X-rays can also image soft tissues throughout early embryonic development of vertebrates. Related to this, a new X-ray method was presented recently in a Nature article published by a German-American-Russian research team led by KIT. For periods of about two hours, time-lapse sequences of cellular resolution were obtained of three dimensional reconstructions showing developing embryos of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis). Instead of the absorption of X-rays, the method is based on their diffraction.