[londons_explore]

> We don’t yet have the technology to just observe all of the activity inside a living cell.

How close are we to being able to make a map of all atoms within a cell? There are 1E23 atoms in 1 ml of water, and an ecoli is about 500nmx500nmx1um. That means there are only about 2E10 atoms in the whole cell!

Would it be possible to somehow freeze a whole cell, then use an electron beam to knock off and identify (via mass) every atom there?

[koeng]

We’re pretty close. There’s TEM microscopy tech which basically tilts a sample to get a bunch of lines, which is then reconstructed as a 3d model.

It’s stupid expensive though, and you can only really identify whole proteins. But you can do that in context, which is massive

[namaria]

Key word here is activity. Even if you froze a cell and mapped it down to an atom, you'd need to do it again for a cell you somehow managed to freeze in the state immediately after the first one, and so on. What granularity would be significant? What branching of what process would you like to follow?