Cell Biology/Introduction/Cells Under

Microscopes
1

Unit Conversion

1 m = 106 m = 103 mm
1 nm = 109 m = 103 m

Light Microscope

One can use a light microscope to see living cells, its

plasma membrane, nucleus and probably some most
prominent organelles (with the help of a computer), as
it can not see things smaller than 0.2 m (due to light
wavelength, not to the quality of lens).

Electron Microscope

An electron microscope uses a beam of electrons to create an image with much ner resolution than a compound
light microscope. Most organisms have to be killed before they can be observed in an electron microscope (the
sole exception being a tick). Some transmission electron
microscopes can have a resolution of better than 50 pm,
and can magnify up to 10 000 000x. This is smaller than
the wavelength of visible light, which is between 390 700 nm, so it cannot use light; thus, electrons are used
rather than light. The two main types of electron microscopes are transmission electron microscopes (TEM) and
scanning electron microscopes (SEM), and both of them
usually need a partial vacuum in order to view the specimens, making them costly. However, they are much better for perceiving cell details than <2 000x magnication
compound light microscopes.

Naked eye

Some very large cells can be seen with the eye alone. An
example of this is gromia sphaerica which has a maximum specimen size of 38 mm (millimeters).

5 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

5.1

Text

Cell Biology/Introduction/Cells Under Microscopes Source: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cell_Biology/Introduction/Cells_Under_

Microscopes?oldid=2777988 Contributors: QuiteUnusual, AmieKim, Dets65, Tim Topolski and Anonymous: 2

5.2

Images

5.3

Content license

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0