Appreciating the Process of Distinguishing Organelles
- When looking at a prepared sample (e.g. a cell or a group of cells) under a microscope, you can sometimes see things that aren’t actually part of the specimen
- These are known as artefacts
- Artefacts can be a variety of things, such as:
- dust
- air bubbles
- fingerprints
- These artefacts often occur during the preparation of a sample
- During preparation, a sample is often squashed or stained, which can generate artefacts
- The occurrence of artefacts can be decreased by more careful preparation of samples
- Artefacts are common in electron micrographs (especially in samples prepared for viewing using a transmission electron microscope) due to the lengthy treatment required to prepare samples
- This was particularly problematic for early research by scientists using the first electron microscopes
- To distinguish between artefacts and organelles, they had to repeatedly prepare a specimen in different ways, using different techniques
- If they saw a particular object in a specimen prepared using one preparation technique, but not another, the object was more likely to be an artefact than an organelle
- This was a problem for the scientific community that persisted for a considerable period of time until preparation techniques and knowledge of organelles improved
