No, not a fish - a protozoan. Dual colour confocal of autofluorescence and DIC / Nomarski micrographs. Leica SP8, Photoshop, ImageJ.

A parasitic ciliate that lives on the gills of freshwater shrimp

Approximately 1.3mm long - massive for a single cell!

Superb organism - again from archive (antique) microscopy slide. This protozoa attaches to vegetation and siphons water by propelling itself backwards and forwards on its helical, contractile stalk (in this image the stalks are false coloured and are ~0.5mm long).

Composite DIC / autofluorescence micrograph taken with Leica SP8, with LASX software and enhanced with Photoshop.

Triple colour combined autofluorescence confocal section of fern root transection. The cool thing here is that the slide with the fern section is about 100 years old.

Leica SP8 (section width ~1.5mm)

Both the Leica confocal and Zeiss Axioskop produce great images; this image is stitched from two micrographs and the monochrome red fluorescence has been inverted to produce a lace-like black and white image of the fern rhizome section.

Scanning confocal sections through Marsh thistle pollen grain. Montage created in ImageJ and false coloured orange in Photoshop. With support from Dr Liz Franklin.

Leica SP8 confocal, LAS-X software. The pollen grain is approximately 5 microns in diameter.

Wide-field fluorescence image of blow fly heart (blue bottle, Calliphora spp). With help from Chris Dwen and Andrew Whittington.

Zeiss Axioskop Lab A1 with Ximea XiD 12 MP camera

These are alary muscles (red) and they tether the heart tube (not shown - but at the base of the muscles) to the insect abdominal cavity. The green cells are possibly oenocytes, cells with features similar to that of human liver hepatocytes.

Single optical section using Leica SP8 confocal microscope.

Composite image from 41 confocal and optical sections of combined autofluorescence and Nomarski (DIC) illumination. This little critter is about 0.1mm in length. With help from Dr Dan Franklin.

Confocal section of a valve region of insect heart. This fruit fly is expressing a fluorescently tagged collagen (Viking-GFP). The GFP (green fluorescent protein) is derived from a jellyfish gene, the discovery and exploitation of which gained Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008. Here, GFP has been engineered into flies to show off where collagen accumulates. The original image was developed as part of a student dissertation by Leigh Vaughan.

Leica SP8 with LAS X software. Inverted fluorescence image, false coloured in Photoshop.

(Not taken at BU). Dual colour composite image of experimentally induced human thrombus. Wide-field fluorescence micrograph taken using a Zeiss Axioskop II linked with Hammatsu Orca CCD camera

Dual colour confocal section of fruit fly heart.