Although substantial improvements must be made in resolution and sensitivity if the instrument is to single out individual atoms, the resolution already obtained is better than that of conventional NMR devices by about an order of magnitude. Rapid progress continues unabated. A high-resolution NMR microscope would reduce the time required for mapping a molecule from months or years to perhaps hours or days. Less obvious, but equally important, would be a speed-up of the research cycle in areas such as protein design, where currently a great deal of effort is required to characterize an experimental molecule after it is synthesized. This, in turn, would make proteins and other polymers more attractive as nanotechnological materials.
Much biological research is done with tissue cultures rather than with whole organs or organisms.
These typically consist of cells that are made to grow and reproduce in a stirred vessel or on an undifferentiated surface. The cells grow willy nilly, lose synchrony, randomly contact and influence each other, and become inhomogeneous in size and behavior. This nonuniformity acts as statistical noise in biological experiments and causes the loss of valuable information. A research group at MIT and Harvard sought to eliminate these problems by controlling the shapes, sizes, and locations of cells grown on a culture plate. A way was needed to force cells to grow in a rectangular array, each cell separated from its neighbors.