Sprez­zatura in the Lab

by Elio

Sprez­zatura is a term from the Ital­ian Re­nais­sance that de­notes the art of mak­ing the dif­fi­cult look easy, a kind of non-cha­lance. Ex­am­ples are the Mona Lisa or Michael Jor­dan at work. In sci­ence, some ex­tra­or­di­nar­ily dif­fi­cult ex­per­i­ments are made to look easy when de­scribed in a pa­per. But we are not so eas­ily fooled; we know what went into them.

I have two re­cent ex­am­ples in mind.

One is the re­port that the genome se­quence of sin­gle bac­te­r­ial cells can be de­ter­mined, at least in part. This is be­ing at­tempted by sev­eral other labs, as well, and it is likely that sev­eral ap­proaches will be­come avail­able soon. The one in this re­port makes use of mi­croflu­idics, a fancy way to make test tubes smaller and smaller, each with its own ports for the ad­di­tion and re­moval of re­ac­tants. The pos­si­ble uses of such a method­ol­ogy are open to everyone's imag­i­na­tion.

The Ul­tra­minute De­vice. Source: Ven­ema L (2007). Ap­plied Physics: Weight In­side. Na­ture 446, 994

The sec­ond ex­am­ple deals with the fab­ri­ca­tion of an ul­trasensitive bal­ance ca­pa­ble of mea­sur­ing the mass of an ob­ject in the fem­togram range. That's a cou­ple of or­ders of mag­ni­tude smaller than the weight of one E. coli. Their trick is to use an ul­tra­minute can­tilever-shaped cham­ber through which they pump flu­ids. The cham­ber with the item to be mea­sured is sus­pended within a vac­uum cham­ber, a trick which per­mits mea­sure­ment of extre­mely small dis­place­ments. How small is ex­tremely small? Sin­gle bac­te­ria are no prob­lem, and nei­ther are tiny mo­nolayers of pro­teins. Again, sit back and let your imagi­nation roam freely – all the ques­tions you could an­swer with such a de­vice! For a com­men­tary, click here. To of­fer your own sug­ges­tions, post a com­ment.

Ear­lier in my life, such feats were in the province of sci­ence fic­tion tales, and even there would have stretched the credulity of the reader.