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by jtaillon 2067 days ago
That's pretty much correct. Single-atom imaging is possible using aberration-corrected scanning TEM, but the beam doses used will typically obliterate anything organic through radiolysis or ionization damage (although there are emerging ways around that using some interesting compressive sensing techniques).

Most "atomic resolution" EM images you see are actually images of columns of atoms, since the imaging mode is transmission, so necessarily the image is summed through the plane of the sample (so atomic resolution is only in the perpendicular plane).

The techniques used in this paper get around the dose issue by taking many images of very many presumably identical proteins (called dose fractionation) at very low dose. Computer algorithms are then used to stitch together a 3D model based on the low-dose individual images. Making it really cold also helps things from breaking down under the beam.