Animations und Scientific Video Clips

Ovulation filmed from start to finish for the first time

Christopher Thomas, Tabea Lilian Marx et al. / Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences

Live video of ovulation in a mouse follicle.

Computer Simulations

Fascinating insights into the ribosome's "machine room"

Who actually drives whom in complex work processes? This question also arises in the protein factories of the cell – the ribosomes. Computer simulations by a team of researchers from Göttingen, Jülich and Düsseldorf have shown for the first time in atomic detail which mechanisms and forces are at work in the ribosome. (Press release November 5, 2013, in German)

Website of the Department of Theoretical and Computational Biophysics by Helmut Grubmüller

Scientists unveil secrets of important natural antibiotic

Ions passing the dermcidin channel

An international team of scientists from Göttingen, Edinburgh, Tübingen, and Strasbourg has now been able to resolve the atomic structure of an important natural antibiotic called dermcidin. Applying extensive computer simulations, the team around our researcher Bert de Groot watched the channel as it performs its action. Surprisingly, the ions traversed the dermcidin channel along a very unusual pathway. (Press release February 21, 2013)

Website of the Research Group of Computational Biomolecular Dynamics by Bert de Groot

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)

Listen live while talking

This real-time MRI film shows the movements in the mouth and throat when speaking live: The spatial-temporal coordination of lips, tongue, soft palate, and larynx, which is necessary to form vowels, consonants, and coarticulations, becomes visible

How our heart beats

The real-time MRI movie shows the natural movements of the chest: Breathing and heartbeat are clearly visible. In contrast to clinical practice with conventional magnetic resonance imaging, the patient does not have to hold his breath thanks to the fast image rate, nor does the recording have to be controlled by the ECG signal.

Sung live

The real-time MRI video makes the movements in the mouth and throat visible when singing.

Horn playing in the MRI scanner

Real-time MRI film of a horn-playing musician. The horn (a natural horn) was built especially for use in the MRI scanner and is played here lying down. The mouthpiece of the horn is not visible. This application is particularly interesting to examine professional musicians with a muscle disorder in the mouth.

Images of moving organs and joints have so far hardly been possible with MRI. Our scientist Jens Frahm and his team have significantly shortened the time for an image capture once again decisively – to only one fiftieth of a second. With this breakthrough, the dynamics of organs and joints can be filmed "live" for the first time: eye and jaw movements as well as the bending knee or the beating heart. (Press releases June 7, 2018; April 24, 2018; February 26, 2016, in German; June 4, 2013, in German; August 30, 2010, in German)

Website of the Biomedical NMR by Jens Frahm

STED and MINFLUX Microscopy

Movement pattern of 30S ribosomes in a bacterium

Movement pattern of two different 30S ribosomes (parts of protein factories, green and orange) in an E. coli bacterium (black-white). To visualize the very fast movements of the 30S ribosomes, the speed of the video is reduced by a factor of 50.

Scientists around our Nobel Laureate Stefan Hell have developed a new fluorescence microscope allowing, for the first time, to optically separate molecules, which are only nanometers (one millionth of a millimeter) apart from each other: The MINFLUX microscope is more than 100 times sharper than conventional light microscopes and exceeds even the best super-resolution light microscopy methods to date, namely STED developed by Hell and PALM/STORM described by Nobel laureate Eric Betzig, by up to 20 times. (Press Release December 22, 2016)

Super-sharp video clip of the cell

Scientists at our institute and the Cluster of Excellence "Microscopy in the Nanometer Range", which was established in line with the German Excellence Initiative of the University of Göttingen, have succeeded in recording the first video ever on the nanoscale live from inside a living cell. Using the STED microscope, the researchers followed the rapid movements of tiny cell building blocks with up to 28 images per second and with an up to four times better resolution compared to conventional light microscopes. For the first time, scientists could track in real-time how vesicles move within living nerve cells. (Press release February 29, 2008)

Website of the Department of NanoBiophotonics by Stefan Hell