/Tech5h ago

UC Berkeley and Biohub develop a laser phase plate to enable atomic-resolution cryo-electron tomography of small proteins

The device generates the world's brightest continuous-wave laser.

1743.4K4521.4K498.3K

#130

Original post

Alex Rives@alexrives

Together with UC Berkeley we are announcing the laser phase plate - a breakthrough in atomic resolution imaging. This is the brightest continuous wave laser in the world, 100 million times the intensity of the surface of the sun.

Phase contrast plays an important role in microscopy, but it was thought close to impossible for electron microscopy, where it would require interfering with an electron beam. Holger Mueller and Robert Glaeser proposed exactly this using a standing wave laser. It has taken over 15 years to make this a reality. Biohub partnered with UC Berkeley and Mueller to support this work and to engineer and build the technology.

Contrast has been the critical barrier to achieving atomic resolution imaging of the cell. In cryo-electron tomography, a cellular imaging technology that uses electron microscopy, the low contrast makes it impossible to resolve anything but the largest proteins within their cellular context. The laser phase plate removes that barrier.

With advances in AI this breakthrough in contrast will start to open up a new frontier in structural biology, that will allow us to see the molecular machines of the cell, and how they assemble into far more complex and dynamic systems, and understand how they work.

11:00 AM · Jun 11, 2026 · 502.7K Views

Sentiment

Users are excited about UC Berkeley and Biohub's laser phase plate for atomic resolution imaging because it overcomes a long-standing cryo-ET bottleneck and could let AI better map living cells to rewrite biology.

Pos

100.0%

Neg

0.0%

38 comments with sentiment.

Cluster Engagement

Posts from X

Most Activity

VIEWS14KBOOKMARKS99LIKES187RETWEETS17REPLIES4

Alex Rives@alexrives

Read more: https://biohub.org/blog/laser-phase-plate-cryo-em-making-invisible-visible/

2d14K18799

Yann LeCun@ylecun

@alexrives @Andercot Amazing 👏

2d6.5K823

David@DavidSHolz

@alexrives so cool

2d4.1K372

Bryan Johnson@bryan_johnson

@alexrives This is awesome. Seeing the molecular machinery may open up entirely new frontiers to understand aging.

6h1.6K441

Arcadiy Ivanov@IAmArcIvanov

@alexrives How does cell (or anything) survives exposure to such continuous energies?

2d4.6K151

Tim Fallon, PhD@photocyte

@alexrives Hi Alex, PKZILLA discoverer here. The (alleged) largest known protein, 1.25x times the size of titin. If I ship a cell expressing PKZILLA to you, can you see it? In every faculty and industry interview I was asked me if I was going to structurally characterize it. Can't be done!

2d2.8K191

Mingye Wang 0.97@Arthur2e5

@IAmArcIvanov @alexrives they don’t, that’s why you freeze them (cryo) so they don’t all run away doing brownians

2d55042

Romain Lacombe@rlacombe

@IAmArcIvanov @alexrives The cell never interacts with the laser, only the electron beam that went through the sample does.

2d504101

Arcadiy Ivanov@IAmArcIvanov

@Arthur2e5 @alexrives Fair point but by surviving I didn't mean biological surviving but more like not becoming a ball of plasma instantaneously.

2d52851

Tim McGee@TR_McGee

@alexrives How do I get in line to use it to look at fiber formation, and mineralization? First suggested use is medical grade collagen manufacturing, so that we can create optical replacement parts for eyes, as well as gradient replacements for tendons.

1d1.5K42

andy@1a1n1d1y

@alexrives this is one of the better photonics visualizations i've seen lately

also JEEZ MAN that's a huge improvement, amazing work, congrats and bravo!!

1d2.4K17

Romain Lacombe@rlacombe

@IAmArcIvanov @alexrives Think of the laser as a lens. Electrons coming out of the sample are split in two streams (main beam vs electrons scattered by sample). Laser shifts phase of the latter beam. Better contrast ensues, which means higher resolution imaging.

2d27114

AHQ⁵@AhQFish

@alexrives Check out “a periodic lattice” a “literal analog” for a phase transition

2d33312

Arcadiy Ivanov@IAmArcIvanov

@rlacombe @alexrives Ah! Thanks! So could you describe the process more in detail? Where does the laser enter in the process?

2d4954

PHOTON COURIER@Ahmourinabil20

A complete first-principles study of the real parts of the eigenvalues of the real elliptic Ginibre ensemble S = H + gA in the strong-coupling limit g → ∞ — and a small voyage in which every result was caught, weighed, and made to confess its origin before it was allowed into the paper.

Main results, all proved analytically and verified by an independent high-statistics simulation at a fixed seed:

• An exact finite-n variance floor for the real parts that is PARITY-SPLIT:

(n−2)/[2(n−1)] for even n, and exactly 1/2 for odd n — the odd value carried by a single guaranteed real eigenvalue of double variance.

• The algebraic reason behind that lonely mode: under multiplication by i, the ensemble sits exactly in Altland–Zirnbauer CLASS D. The odd-n eigenvalue is the topologically protected MAJORANA ZERO-MODE (index ν = 1 odd / 0 even), protected for all couplings. A random-matrix variance turns out to be a statement about topological superconductors.

• A genuine odd 1/g correction (decisive at 8σ) that no symmetric Lorentzian can reproduce, traced to eigenvector non-normality, a critical α = 1 heavy tail, and persistently-defective near-real modes.

• An exact quasi-independence lemma for the real parts, a Gumbel extreme-value law

under one trace constraint, the exact conditional-floor coefficient (n−1)/[n(n+2)], and asymptotic universality.

Everything reached by elementary means — first-order perturbation theory, Wick contraction, trace identities — where the literature uses skew-orthogonal

polynomials and Pfaffian processes. Throughout, a strict discipline: no fitting presented as derivation, no manual adjustment, no hidden correction, and every wall named honestly — including the one coefficient a(n) left open for the reason its own α = 1 criticality dictates.

A companion Python script reproduces every number in the paper from a fixed seed.

No number was forced; every failed guess is recorded as a failure. That honesty is

the real treasure.

2d34041

ItsBS@Its_BS

@alexrives Those don't look like "light particle photons." 😂

2d1.5K5

AgentsofArchitecture@AgentsofArch

@alexrives Can you do this passing through a complex object on a larger scale re the human body , and therefor replace mri imaging.

1d1.8K

⸎Medusa⸎𓆙 ϬɸяϬɸήSS Ϭ⧬đđЗŝŝ ⸎Serpent Ƥя¡ήcεşş𓆙⧪𖤐@MedusaEmpresss

@alexrives you haven't developed the essential mechanisms to discover the framework necessary to understand the fundamental processes of biology and studying molecules with your tools won't bridge the gap, but rather further the gap into your logical distortions.

2d1.2K

Max Song (🌎, 🌍, 🌏)@Pericarus

@alexrives @grok can you explain the context of this particular announcement the corresponding technology advances that made this possible and also the consequences of this new capability

1d629

Romain Lacombe@rlacombe

@IAmArcIvanov @alexrives That’s my cursory understanding, the papers likely do a better job than me explaining how this works.

2d2418