Tsz Wai (Bernice) Chan

DNA replication occurs 2 trillion times per cell daily and is essential for our cells to divide. DNA replication happens when the two strands of DNA separate, creating a fork for proteins like enzymes to attach and copy each strand. My project was to investigate what happens at the replication-fork and what conditions can stall it, aiming to provide insight into replication-fork stalling cancer treatments. This was achieved by a technique called DNA fibres, enabling me to use a fluorescent microscope and see the actual DNA strands in different colours and lengths, under different conditions. Each 'firework' is from each cell bursting, releasing their DNA strands.

Sunandan Dhar

The skin wrinkles into shape! The image shows a layer of skin cells (called the dermatome) in a 1-day-old zebrafish embryo viewed through a microscope at 1000X magnification. The nuclei of the cells are shown in blue, while a signalling molecule, RhoA, is in orange, as it instructs the mechanics of the developing tissue causing it to stretch and contract. This process of skin formation is the same for all vertebrates, from fish to dogs to humans. Understanding such processes will help cure skin-related diseases and make artificial skin to treat wounds.

Serena Thomas

A fluorescent microscopy image of a 24 hours old zebrafish embryo, showing the chevron-shaped blocks of future skeletal muscle tissue. The cell membranes are shown in red, with the nuclei in blue. If a cell is like a factory then the nucleus is its boss, responding to changes in the cell shape and environment to tell the cell how to react and what proteins to make as a result. Most cells only have one nucleus, but some cells - such as muscle fibres - require many more to function properly. Within individual cells, structural proteins known as microtubules (shown in green) help position the nuclei, transport proteins, and provide structural support. Microtubules are also essential in ensuring skeletal muscle forms correctly.

Reanna Gregory

This image shows kidney cells taken from an African Green Monkey. The nucleus has been stained with a specialised green dye so it can be viewed under a microscope. These cells have been infected with a type of virus called IBV, which has been stained with a red dye. Using two different colours allows us to differentiate the monkey cells from the surrounding virus particles. You can see that the virus particles have entered into the monkey cells and multiplied; the inside of the cell provides a great environment for viruses to replicate and increase in number. Viruses are extremely small so the fact we can visibly see the virus in this image implies there are large quantities present.

Sareeta Bagri

A chicken cell expressing a Marek disease virus (MDV) protein, UL35 (in red) colocalising with the mitochondria (in green). The prominent orange colour is a strong indicator of UL35 colocalising with the mitochondria due to an N-terminal mitochondrial targeting sequence appended to UL35. The viral protein is found in the capsid of MDV, a herpes virus prevalent in chickens. The viral protein is suspected to interact with the motor protein, dynein to assist viral transport in chicken cells. The image was captured on the Delta Vision widefield deconvolution microscope.

Sara Toral-Pérez

This image shows an early zebrafish oocyte. The oocytes are found in the females and are the cells that give rise to the new organisms once fertilised with the male sperm. In this picture we have used fluorescent compounds to stain the outlines (red) and the DNA of the cell (blue). In green, we have a component called germ plasm, which is essential to determine the oocyte fate of the cell.

Nick R. Waterfield & Thomas Brooker

This is an image of a recently evolved (pretty nasty) anthrax-like bacterial strain showing all the different developmental forms it can adopt; Highly resistant spores (white), single cells blue/red and long chains (mostly blue). The blue colour shows the location of the DNA of the cell and the red is the cell membrane. This strain infected a welder in Louisiana. Interestingly all related strains only seem to infect metal-workers which remains quite a mystery. The image was taken on a Leica inverted fluorescence microscope by my former PhD student Tom Brooker (now a successful high school teacher).

Rahil Haria

Image of a smashed piece of Indium Bismide that has been cooled with liquid nitrogen and imaged with phase contrast microscopy. One can see individual layers of the tetragonal material. This is a semimetal which could have some very interesting spintronic applications.

Regina Szokodi

Isopropanol on a black latex glove. The colourful grainy reflections within the alcohol resemble glitter fireworks. Isopropanol is used as an antiseptic and a cleaning agent. It is also put in a number of cosmetics, including aftershave lotion and hand lotion.

Emily Sanderson

The red flour beetle lays eggs that can be used to examine how insect development happens. This embryo was taken from a very early stage, not long after the egg was laid. The eggshell was removed so the cells could be examined, and they were stained with a specific dye. This dye stains only DNA, which means it helps identify the nuclei of a cell, the place where DNA is stored. We do this so we can see the stage of development of the embryo and where the cells are located. This helps us see details about how development occurs. After the cell was stained it was examined under UV light so that the dye would fluoresce, which gave us an image of the cells in the developing embryo, with glowing nuclei.

Colin Clay & John Walsh

This image was produced using an Electron Microscope. It shows an incredibly thin slice through a plant pathogen called Spongospora that infects watercress roots. The image shows a very small part of a zoospore, one of the developmental stages of the pathogen that swims around in soil water by beating its two flagella. As well as causing damage to watercress plants, the pathogen also transmits a virus to the plants.

At the centre of the image there is a ring of nine microtubule triplets. The microtubules are the powerhouse, providing the movement of the flagella, that in turn propels the zoospores through the water. You have microtubules in your body and they have a number of functions, such as positioning the membrane vesicles and organelles in your cells.

Electron microscopes can achieve extremely high magnifications by firing electrons through ultrathin sections that have been stained with heavy metals. The individual microtubules that make up the triplets are approximately 25 nanometres in diameter (this is 25 millionths of a millimetre), or approximately 1/3000 the diameter of a strand of your hair!

Francisco Alvarado Cesar

This image shows plenty of crystal defects in a semiconductor. A crystal is a solid material made of tiny parts called atoms. These atoms are arranged in a regular pattern and have repeating layers of them (stacking planes). These semiconductor crystals are essential for our modern life. Your phone, your computer, and all electronic devices operate with the use of semiconductor crystals. In order to work correctly, these crystals must be perfectly arranged. For that reason, it is important to inspect them under a microscope, as their performance depends on their quality. Sometimes they grow with some defects on it. For example, the order of the stacking planes is interrupted. This defect is known as a stacking fault, like the ones you are seeing right now. This image was taken with a scanning electron microscope (ZEISS GeminiSEM) by a technique called Electron Channeling Contrast Imaging (ECCI), which can help us to reveal these kinds of defects that are invisible to the naked eye.

Anne Straube

Public Vote - Runner Up

The image shows the nucleus (the brain of the cell) in blue and the cell's skeleton in white. The red comets show where the white skeleton fibres are assembled. If we film the cell with a microscope in real time, these shoot like fireworks from the cell centre to the edges of the cell. This shows that the cell's skeleton constantly reassembles and thereby allows the cell to change shape and move.

Meera Unnikrishnan & Kate Watkins

Expert Vote - Winner

The image shows the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus (green), also commonly known as methicillin resistant S. aureus (MRSA), inside human macrophages (red, with blue nuclei). This bacterium is a dangerous human pathogen which is resistant to many common antibiotics and responsible for several life-threatening infections including pneumonia and endocarditis. MRSA can stick to and get inside a range of human cells including macrophages, immune cells that defend us against infections. These clever bacteria use the human cell as a niche where they can multiply while protecting themselves from antibiotics. MRSA multiplies and takes over the cell, finally escaping by bursting open the cell. This image shows macrophages full of bacteria just before they burst and escape.

Meghane Sittewelle

This image is taken with a confocal microscope and shows a fusion event of four different vesicles (from top to bottom) at the surface of a human cell. Different time points of the event are shown (from left to right). To transport things like proteins or macromolecules inside the cell, we have different kinds of vesicles. Here you can appreciate the staining of a protein located inside the membrane of the vesicle, called synaptophysin. When the vesicle binds to the surface of the cell, it starts fusing to release its content outside of the cell. Here, when the fusion starts, you can see the tagged synaptophysin brighter. Then you see the progression of the diffusion of the released protein at the cell surface.

John James

Public Vote - Winner

This image shows different views of a single pumpkin pollen that has been stained with a specialised dye. Even though pollen looks smooth, it is in fact covered with lots of small ‘spikes’, which help it cling to insects when they are collecting nectar from the plant’s flowers. Distinct parts of the stained pollen can be visualised by shining lasers of different ‘colours’ on it. This causes these regions to fluoresce, and the light that it gives out can be collected by a camera on a microscope. The pollen reminds me of peony fireworks exploding in the sky.

Danielle Groves

Expert Vote - Runner Up

You may not be a big fan of the tiny virus that has caused a global pandemic spanning the last few years, but I hope you can appreciate that SARS-CoV-2 can look good under the right lighting! Viruses are so small that it is actually not possible to use microscopes to see them using light, however, it is possible to use lasers to excite fluorescent tags labelling virus proteins. Here we have tagged the nucleocapsid protein, found in the middle of the virus green, and the spike protein on the surface, red. If these tags are excited and light up and switch off at different times, over lots of images, it is possible to reconstruct an accurate image of a firework.. I mean a virus!

Pooja Agarwal

This image shows epithelial cells infected with Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus). Epithelial cells are the covering of our body both outside and inside, such as your skin, blood vessels, urinary tract, or organs. They act as a barrier and protect internal cells from the attack of pathogenic agent e.g., bacteria and viruses. S. aureus naturally colonises 30-40% human population, but it can breach the protective layer and lead to multiple diseases such as boils, severe pneumonia and sepsis when entering the bloodstream, especially in immunocompromised patients. We focus on how S. aureus breaches and invades the protective layer. In this picture, epithelial cells, stained with special dye (specific for actin filament which is involved in many cellular processes such as cell motility), can be seen in red. We used S. aureus which harbours green fluorescent protein and can be seen as green circles. Nucleus, which contains genetic information of a cells, was stained blue.

Ethan Han

This is a picture taken from a piece of gallium nitride (GaN) single crystal by a transmission electron microscope (TEM). GaN is a main component in many light emitting diode (LED) lights. LED lights are commonly used now in light bulbs, TV screens, flashlights and Christmas lights. GaN LED light bulbs can save a lot of electricity since they are much more efficient than conventional tungsten filament light bulbs. This GaN foil is so thin (< 100 nm) that it is even transparent to high energy electrons. A human hair is 700 times thicker than this thin foil. This thin foil can be bent and even have creases. These features are captured in this picture as contours since they scatter electrons differently.

Chloe Newsom

These images show synthetic diamonds humans have grown in a laboratory. The white patterns show strain and dislocation bundles within the diamond. These are parts of the diamond where the atoms are not ordered in the usual nice pattern but instead are bundled up, pushing against each other creating imperfections. If we pass polarised light through the diamond it interacts with these imperfections and can change its polarisation direction. When we collect the light through another polariser only the light that has been changed is visible. This creates bright white patterns where the strain is in the diamond.

Khush Shah

The samples show MoS2 nanoflakes on a SiO2 substrate. These flakes have been made via mechanical exfoliation of bulk MoS2, although neither of the images show pure 2D flakes (~ an atomic layer thick allowing for considering the material with 2D quantum mechanics), they show very thin layers (about 4 - 5 atomic layers thick). The mechanical exfoliation is done with scotch tape.