News
2023 Huygens Image Contest
Congrats to Vishakha Vishwakarma!
Vishakha, a former PhD student from Dr. SeYeon Chung’s lab, was one of the winners of the 2023 Huygens Image Contest!
Her stunning image, captured on our Leica TCS SP8 Confocal Microscope with a White Light Laser (WLL), earned her the 6th place spot. We're proud to have been part of this amazing work!
Clear visualization of interesting phenotype. Unlike wild-type embryo (top panels),
loss of Smog GPCR (bottom panels) results in slight disruption of the overall embryonic
morphology, including defects in the head region, elongated salivary gland placode,
a wavy embryo surface and an irregular ventral midline. 3D reconstructed images (middle
panels) show the salivary gland placode elongated along the DV axis and enlarged cells
upon loss of smog. Strikingly, smog loss also results in the formation of numerous
blebs in the apical membrane of salivary gland cells, which are not observed in wild-type
salivary gland cells, suggesting defects in the cortical actin network (rightmost
panels). Overall, our work suggests multifunctional roles of GPCR signaling during
epithelial morphogenesis.
Image Featured on the Cover of Biology Open
An image acquired using the Leica TCS SP8 Confocal Microscope with White Light Laser (WLL) at our microscopy facility was featured on the cover of Biology Open, as part of the publication 'Nucleolar stress in Drosophila neuroblasts, a model for human ribosomopathies' by Sonu S. Baral, a former doctoral student in Dr. Patrick J. DiMario’s laboratory.
In a study by Baral and colleagues wild-type (w1118) larval brains at 3 days old were EdU pulse labelled (Click-iT Alexa Fluor 594) for 30 min to visualize all S-phase cells: neuroblasts (NB) and ganglionic mother cells (GMCs). This merged confocal image shows EdU-labelled cells (magenta; mushroom body NBs and their GMCs) nestled within the GFP-labelled mushroom body NBs lineage (green) near the posterior regions of the central brain lobe. Scale bar: 50 microns. Image licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.