You Want to Examine the Structure of the Protein Coat

Multiple Choice

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.