In a lab at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, scientists can now watch a butterfly wing cool itself in sunlight, a drug capsule release its medicine, or a biomaterial interact with living tissue — all by zooming from the whole sample down to the tiniest nanometer scale in a single imaging session. The technology that makes this possible lives in a place called COCOON, the Center for Optical Characterization of Organic and Natural Materials. Most microscopy centers around the world cannot do what this lab can do.
The secret is not one special machine but a whole team of microscopes that work together. At its heart sits a scanning electron microscope powerful enough to see features just 0.8 nanometers wide — about the size of a single glucose molecule. This microscope teams up with instruments that map which molecules are present and which atoms make them up. Scientists can combine all three types of data into one detailed picture showing shape, texture, and chemical composition all at once.
Before COCOON existed, researchers who wanted to study something across multiple scales had to move their samples between different machines in different places. Each move risked damaging the sample or losing track of exactly which spot they were examining. For living tissues, the problem was even worse. Most high-powered electron microscopes require a vacuum, which dries out the water that gives cells their shape. COCOON solves this by rapidly freezing samples before imaging, locking biological tissues in a state that closely matches how they look and work in nature.
The lab was born from necessity. "We needed to know how materials were made and organized, from the nano to the macro scale," said Giulia Guidetti, a research assistant professor of biomedical engineering who works in the facility. Fiorenzo Omenetto, the Frank C. Doble Professor of Engineering who directs the broader Silklab research group, explained the key advantage: if researchers spot something interesting with one microscope, they can examine the exact same spot using other microscopes without ever losing track of the location.
The lab is now open to outside researchers from universities and companies who need answers about how their materials behave at every scale. Other instruments in the suite can create sliced images at different depths inside a material — like a medical CAT scan — and one can map surfaces at near-atomic resolution. The hope is that better understanding materials from top to bottom will lead to breakthroughs in medicine, manufacturing, and beyond.