PHOTOS: Best Pictures of Microscopic Life, 2008

PHOTOS: Best Pictures of Microscopic Life, 2008
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Fourth Prize: Brainbows

This picture of the brain of a five-day-old zebrafish, by Harvard chemist Albert Pan, uses the novel "brainbow" genetic engineering technique. (See "'Brainbows' Illuminate the Mind's Wiring.")

Pan produced zebrafish larvae with a special gene (extracted from coral and jellyfish) that produces a kind of tagging protein. The fish's nervous systems shot out little fluorescent "paintballs," whose tracks effectively showed where neurons connected.
—Picture by Albert Pan, courtesy 2008 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition
 

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