BERKELEY, Calif. and REDWOOD CITY, Calif., June 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — In a landmark achievement in biological imaging, researchers at Biohub and the University of California, Berkeley today announced the successful demonstration of the laser phase plate, a novel device that dramatically improves the contrast of images produced by cryo-electron microscopes, opening up an entirely new view of human biology.

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is itself a revolutionary, Nobel Prize–winning technology that has become the backbone of structural biology, having revealed the atomic-level architecture of many of the molecular machines that drive nearly every cellular process. But the technique has been hampered by the inability to generate enough contrast to clearly image small molecules — more than 90% of the proteins found inside human cells are too small for cryo-EM to capture clearly.