1st prize: Felix Mikus
Time series projection of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum (a.k.a. The Blob) colonising an agar plate. Actomyosin contractions allow this single, giant cell – containing thousands of nuclei sharing a single cytoplasm – to “expand” at centimetres per hour, making it large enough to be photographed using an iPhone 11.
2nd prize: Sam Dunkley
Single slice Airyscan image of a C57Bl/6 mouse oocyte arrested at metaphase-I of Meiosis. Actin filaments can be seen permeating the microtubule-based spindle. Chromosome labelled with Hoechst (blue), the microtubule spindle by tubulin (green) and actin with phalloidin (magenta). The image was taken using a Zeiss LSM 800 with Airyscan.
3rd prize: Tom Mitchell Proximity labelling is a powerful tool to investigate protein trafficking. In these HUVECs a fusion protein of neuropilin-1 and HRP biotinylated proteins within a 20 nm radius (streptavidin, gold). This reveals a highly striated pattern of bounded by, and overlapping the cell junctions (PECAM-1, blue). Nuclei visualised via DAPI (Purple).
You can read more about the people behind these images here.
