This dorsal view of a live juvenile zebrafish won first prize in this year’s Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition. To achieve the otherworldly effect, researcher Daniel Castranova at the National Institutes of Health, assisted by colleague Bakary Samasa, tagged the fish’s lymphatic vessels (orange) and scales (blue) with fluorescent proteins and stitched together more than 350 individual frames.
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See the stunning world invisible to the naked eye
Nikon has announced the winners of its 46th annual Small World Photomicrography Competition.
Researcher Daniel Castranova was about to be kicked off the microscope when he took the picture. A colleague in the Brant Weinstein lab at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland was waiting for a turn on the imaging device, which takes hundreds of frames that later are stitched together. Castranova was bringing a microscopic world into focus, with the hope of revealing unprecedented detail. He had a live juvenile zebrafish suspended in jelly under the lens, and he decided to zoom out from its head for one last shot: a full-body image of the fish. He got it, and then promptly forgot about it. Two weeks later, as he assembled the images, he had a startling result. “I
