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“This signal does not depend on the concentration of the probe or of G-quadruplexes, meaning it can be used to unequivocally visualize these rare molecules.”

These science writers always fail. Of course it depends on the concentration - unless the laws of physics don’t apply.

I am sure the writer was trying to say something that makes sense that is key to the study, but got it wrong.

BenLurkin... You post up some down right cool information. Kudos sir.

Over a 9 year period at the start of my career, I was in R&D doing industrial environmental research and process design. Weird niche for a ChE but I also have a degree in microbiology. This was 1979 onwards. About 4 or 5 months out of college, the corporate VP over R&D was touring our departments (800 persons in the TX facility) and pulled me aside privately for 30 seconds. Hoot he said to me, I've got this several hundred thousand in capital $$$ to spend before the end of the year. Can you spend every nickel of it? Yes sir, I will do my best to help you.

In my building, there was a littler used 1000sqft lab that was out of service and I remodeled and reequipped it for new service. Most of the $$$ went for equipment both new and surplus that I scavenged from other corporate wide facilities. Completed, my setup was similar to and in some respects superior in capabilities to what you would find in a major university.

Along the way, I worked on developing a more accurate toxicity test that was then and still is used in industrial wastewater treatment. This is simply oxygen uptake rate and uses a dissolved oxygen meter and stopwatch. Low tech, which is fine, but I do not like it at all because you can get misleading data in that it can be measuring inhibition and not toxicity. Toxicity by definition is death. That's kind of irreversible.

So, along comes a new analytical technology using a fluorescent chemical very specific to living cells. The key to it was an enzyme extracted out of firefly tails. This reacts with a specific protein in living bacteria cells thus when a cell dies no fluorescence. Funny thing (I'm a geek, okay?) and I kid you not, the instrument company would hire HS and college kids in the summer to run at night through rows of Midwest farm fields with butterfly nets to harvest fireflies.

The microscope I used at the time could have been used for the picture illustrated in the article. It was a Zeiss Photomicroscope III and had the lenses and outrageous resolution for the job. What would have been lacking in the 1980s though was the computer horsepower required to capture and process the image. It looks like they could have been using a Nomarski Interference Contrast lens.