A fluorescence image of the mosquito heart taken by graduate student Jonas King was awarded 1st place in Nikon’s Small World Photomicrography Competition.  The image, shown below, was selected from over 2,200 submissions and was highlighted in NBC’s Today Show, MSNBC, Discover Magazine, Scientific American, National Geographic, CNN, CBS, NSF News and other sources.

Image credit: Jonas King, Hillyer Lab, Vanderbilt University

Jonas’ winning entry into the Small World competition shows the structural interaction between the mosquito heart (narrow tube running in the horizontal direction), the alary muscles, the intersegmental body muscles and the intrasegmental body muscles.  Muscle was labeled using phalloidin conjugated to a green fluorescent probe and DNA was labeled blue using Hoechst stain.  This research, funded by the National Science Foundation and done with co-authors Justin Glenn, Jonathan Andereck and Julian Hillyer (lab director), was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology and PLoS ONE.

WEB LINKS:

1. •Nikon’s Small World Photomicrography competition - 2010.
   

2. •Official Nikon Press Release (pdf download).
   

3. •Official Nikon Press Release (via MSNBC).
   

4. •Official Nikon Press Release (via Forbes).
   

5. •MSNBC’s Cosmic blog article.
   

6. •NBC’s today webpage highlighting image.
   

7. •Discover Magazine online article.
   

8. •Scientific American article.
   

9. •National Geographic feature.
   

10. •CNN News Feature.
    

11. •CBS News Feature.
    

12. •NSF News From the Field.