Image of the Day: A Mouse Brain Slice Becomes Art

“Neurogarden” by Ainara Pintor won the top prize. The mouse brain slice contains excitatory hippocampal neurons in green, fat mass and obesity-associated protein (FTO) in red, and cell nuclei in blue.

AINARA PINTOR

Ainara Pintor, a PhD student in molecular biology and biomedicine at the University of the Basque Country in Spain, won the global prize in the first Global Image of the Year Life Science Light Microscopy Award by Olympus, according to a press release March 30. Pintor’s image, which she titled “Neurogarden,” features a mouse brain slice immunostained with fluorophores.

“There are over 70 million neurons in a mouse brain,” Pintor says in the statement. “This is an example of what we can observe in the hippocampus of a single brain slice, in this case, taken from Thy1 transgenic mice.”

An image of an autofluorescent mouse embryo submitted by Howard Vindin of Australia captured the Asia-Pacific regional prize, and Tagide deCarvalho of the US won the Americas regional prize for her image of the inside of a tardigrade.

The inside of a tardigrade, commonly known as a water bear, took home the regional prize for submissions from the Americas

TAGIDE DECARVALHO