6 March 2021 | New Scientist | 51The back pages
JO
HNBAILEY,^ ANDREW^
LILJA,
JOHNM
CGHEE^ (
3 DVALAB,^ UNIVERSITY^ OF^ NEWSOUTH^ WALES
)Layal Liverpool is a
digital journalist at
New Scientist. She believes
everyone can be a scientist,
including you. @layallivsThese articles are
posted each week at
newscientist.com/makerWhat you need
Internet access
A web browser open
to zooniverse.org
EVER since I was a child, I have
been fascinated by the vast world
within our bodies and have long
dreamed about what it would be
like to shrink myself down and
explore the inside of a human cell
at the microscopic level. It turns
out I’m not alone: biologists are
trying to do exactly that – and
you and I can help them.
Just as the human body
contains organs that perform
different functions, our cells
have various structures and
pieces of molecular machinery
called organelles. Examples
of organelles are the nucleus,
where DNA is stored, and the
mitochondria, which are sites
of energy production.
Advances in microscope
technology allow researchers
to peer inside human cells in
unprecedented detail, fuelling
key insights. Electron microscopes
use beams of electrons to
illuminate objects, and provide
much higher magnification than
standard light microscopes.
The rate at which electron
microscopy images of cells can
be generated has accelerated in
recent years, says Helen Spiers at
the University of Oxford. “We are
now producing data at a rate faster
than we can analyse it,” she says.
“The gold-standard approach
for analysing this visual data to
make sense of it is segmentation,”
she says. This involves marking
out the organelles by tracing
lines around their edges in a
two-dimensional microscope
image. To speed up the process,
Spiers and her colleaguesWith Etch A Cell, we can help biologists understand killer diseases
hidden in mountains of images, says Layal LiverpoolCitizen science
Become a disease hunter
regularly enlist the help of citizen
scientist volunteers, through the
Etch A Cell project.
I like the occasional colouring
book and found etching cells
in microscope images online
similarly comforting. But it is also
hugely helpful to the researchers:
data gathered through Etch A Cell
has helped artificial intelligence
software learn to identify some
organelles automatically, further
accelerating the analysis process.
One of the latest iterations of
the project, Etch A Cell – VR, aims
to take the process to another level
by using segmentation data from
citizen scientists to reconstruct
three-dimensional cells with
labelled organelles that biologists
can explore using virtual reality.
“It’s about changing your
perspective and allowing youto interact with your data
differently,” says Spiers. “Being
able to rotate things while you’ve
got a VR headset on and just
seeing things in three dimensions,
you might notice something that
you wouldn’t otherwise.”
Researchers could use this
technology to compare cancerous
and non-cancerous cells, for
instance. “That can help you
understand what’s gone wrong
and how you can potentially
fix it,” says Spiers.
You can find all the Etch A Cell
projects, and take part in Etch
A Cell – VR, by heading to the
zooniverse.org web portal
for citizen science. ❚Feedback
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