You want to examine the structure of the protein coat of a virus by microscopy. Which microscope is your best choice, and why?

A. The scanning electron microscope-it has excellent resolution and magnification, much higher than a light microscope, and can clearly visualize viruses.
B. An atomic force microscope-this has the highest resolution and magnification of the microscopes we discussed. Here, we want to visualize a subcomponent of the virus particles, so we need the best value for resolution and magnification we can possibly achieve.
C. A fluorescent microscope-this will let us tag the protein coat with colored dyes in order to visualize it using this light microscope at 1000x.
D. A bright-field light microscope-of course, we'll need to stain the viruses before we can visualize them against the bright white background at 1000x total magnification.


B

Biology & Microbiology

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