To combat a pandemic, science needs to move quickly. With safe and effective vaccines now widely available, and a handful of promising Covid-19 treatments coming soon, there’s no doubt that many aspects of biological research have been successfully accelerated during the past two years.

Now, researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Heidelberg University in Germany have cranked up the speed of imaging infected cells using soft X-ray tomography, a microscopic imaging technique that can generate incredibly detailed three-dimensional scans.

Their approach takes mere minutes to gather data that would require weeks of prep and analysis with other methods, and gives scientists an easy way to quickly examine how our cells’ internal machinery responds to SARS-CoV-2, or other pathogens, as well as how the cells respond to drugs designed to treat the infection.

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