Nirupa Nagaratnam works in a pristine lab on an upper floor of ASU’s Biodesign Institute, Building C. She often sits at a microscope, peering into a plastic plate with miniature wells (think of the divots on an artist’s palette) filled with a colorless liquid.
But when she zooms in, a drop of that colorless liquid becomes its own complex world, a landscape that looks like the bottom of a jewelry box, filled with iridescent crystals.
It’s a small part of an experimental design that Nagaratnam, a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University, hopes will one day help her and other researchers develop a new way of studying drugs for diseases like cancer. She envisions a world where researchers can test new treatments and watch them in real time, essentially creating a molecular movie, one she can watch frame by frame with a close-up view of proteins shifting and folding in