UC San Diego team claims it's built a better microscope

Crystal structure of self-assembled materials. Blue dots represent strongly bound water. The variation of the number of water molecules reflects the potential heterogeneity of the strongly bound water numbers in each site. [Image courtesy of Haoyuan Wang, UC San Diego]

A UC San Diego research team claims it’s developed a microscope that gives them a thorough view of molecular systems — not just single traits of molecules.

The researchers recently published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Wei Xiong and other members of the Xiong Group at UC San Diego developed a transient vibrational sum-frequency generation microscope to inspect hydrogen bond interactions that are critical for self-assembled soft materials — an important area of research for synthetic biology/biomimetics. The delicate H-bond interactions balance electrostatic interactions needed for synthetic lattice self-assemblies that resemble the form and function of their biological analogs (e.g., cells).

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