Image contest 2019 – The winners!

Light microscopy

Neuronal sunflowers

Svetlana Pasteuning-Vuhman
Title: Neuronal sunflowers
Microscope: Confocal microscope LSM 880.
Description: Motor neurons were derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells and stained with neuronal markers.

Spiral of inhibitory neurons

Lotte Herstel
Title: Spiral of inhibitory neurons
Microscope: Confocal Zeiss LSM700
Description: Here shown is an organotypic hippocampal slice of a mouse brain, which was kept in culture for over 2 weeks before fixation. Labelled in blue are all cell bodies (DAPI), to show the outer contours of the slice. In green is the genetic labelling of GAD65-GFP, indicating a subset of inhibitory neurons that express this protein.

Actin everywhere!

Wilco Nijenhuis
Title: Actin everywhere!
Microscope: Leica TCS SP8 STED 3X, 93x/1.30 glycerol objective
Description: STED image of actin in an human intestinal organoid resolving individual microvilli, depth encoded Z projection.

My heart beats for science

Babet van der Vaart
Title: My heart beats for science
Microscope: Spinning Disc 1 Nikon-Roper ILAS PhotoAblation (Kruyt building)
Description: This is a compilation of pictures to form a heart shape. The pictures show a zoom of a human induced-pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocyte, which was transduced with lentiviral vectors to express a GFP-tagged microtubule plus-end marker (end-binding protein 3 (EB3)) and tagRFP-LifeAct; an actin marker. In cardiac cells the actin cytoskeleton forms contractile units named sarcomeres, which allow the cell to beat.

Electron microscopy

Magic Forest

Xudong Ouyang
Title: Magic Forest
Microscope: Phenom PRO desktop scanning electron microscope
Description: It is a 360x magnification of antennas of a bee

Rising Phoenix

Samantha van der Beek
Title: Rising Phoenix
Microscope: Phenom PRO desktop scanning electron microscope
Description: A 320x magnification of the wing of a moth

Air waves

Ann De Mazière
Title: Air waves
Microscope: JEOL 1011 electron microscope
Description: EM image of a part of a tracheole, a branch of the insect airway system, between the circular and longitudinal muscle cell layers of the Drosophila intestinal wall