The winners of the Nikon Small World Toronto imaging competition have been announced!
We are proud that the top three winners as determined by imaging facility managers at SickKids Hospital were from Cell & Systems Biology! These images exploited the newest Nikon AXR NSPARC point-scanning confocal microscopy technology.
First place went to Damo Shi for “Immunofluorescence image of microtubules in the amnioserosa of fog-mutant Drosophila embryos”.
Second place went to Emily Deng for “From water to land: green algae transformed with an Arabidopsis protein required for chloroplast biogenesis”.
Third place went to Rebecca Tam for “Highly folded plasma membrane”.
You can see the full images in our gallery.
Shi’s research with Tirthankar Ray in the Harris lab showed that the amnioserosa of fruit fly embryos is confined by surrounding tissue to form a nematic, or crystal-like, structure.
Shi says that “My image for the competition submission was taken from an embryo with mutations of the gene fog, which perturbs confinement and causes reduced amnioserosa cell alignment.” Instead of aligning to outline crystal shapes, the red-stained microtubules in the fog mutant form stormy streaks.
In Deng’s confocal z-stack image, algal chloroplast structures are shown in yellow and localization of protein from the Arabidopsis plant is shown in green. Deng is studying how chloroplast biogenesis changed as plants moved on to land in the Christendat lab, contrasting aquatic algae and terrestrial Arabidopsis.
Tam’s image shows a fluffy plasma membrane surface, contrasting with the usual image of the plasma membrane as a flat plane. This image comes from studies in early stage Drosophila embryos of how Arp2/3 proteins regulates cortical tension through patterning of myosin that is integrated with highly folded plasma membrane. In this image, the plasma membrane is coloured green and myosin is magenta.
Tam has shown how the plasma membrane is pulled by the centrosome to form a cap as fruit fly embryo cells divide, and this image shows the folding that occurs at a subsequent stage in the development of the Drosophila embryo. Tam recently won the Christine Hone-Buske award for her research.