• Question: Have you ever seen microorganisms through a microscope.

    Asked by MichaelD on 5 Mar 2026.
    • Photo: Estela Gonzalez Fernandez

      Estela Gonzalez Fernandez answered on 5 Mar 2026:

      Hi! Yes, plenty of times! Ay Uni we did lot of Microbiology practice lessons looking bacteria from different samples: water, soil. And at work, one project was about microorganism inside insect’s guts, I was able to look the microorganism alive and moving inside the mosquito gut. It is truly amazing!

    • Photo: Angharad Green

      Angharad Green answered on 5 Mar 2026:

      Hi MichaelD, yes my entire research at the moment is about looking at small bacteria with microscopes! I use high-powered electron microscopes to see inside bacterial cells, looking at things like DNA that we can’t see with our eyes because they’re too small.

    • Photo: John Bergqvist

      John Bergqvist answered on 5 Mar 2026:

      I have! Check out my profile and you will see the bacterium Shigella flexnerii infecting a human cell (HeLa cell line). The bacterium is coloured in red and the cell is coloured in green. I spent a year at an insititute in Paris (Institut Pasteur) where I researched the infection process of this bacterium, so I have lots of very pretty pictures of bacteria 🙂

    • Photo: James Lazenby

      James Lazenby answered on 6 Mar 2026:

      Hello, I literally did this 5 minutes ago. In fact I probably do it at least once a day. Mainly I look at bacteria, but today I was looking at yeast. I was using a microscopy technique called “Phase Contrast Microscopy”.

      When you picture a microscope, or if you have used one, you use a bright light to shine through the sample and then multiple lenses will magnify that image until it’s big enough for your eyes (or a camera to see). However, many microorganisms are really clear so even if you magnify them a lot you still can’t really see them. Phase Contrast microscopy works because the light that is travelling through something is often slower than the light passing by something. Through the use of specialised optical lenses and other apparatus, these differences can be translated to add contrast to the sample, so instead of looking transparent it will look black on a white background.

      There are many other techniques to see bacteria with a microscope, however, a lot of the time you want them to be still because bacteria can move very quickly. So you can kill them so they don’t move or, my favourite technique is to sandwich them between a pad of jelly-like substance and a thin piece of glass we call a coverslip.

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