Skittles for science

What might also be an artistic representation of a scattered bowl of Skittles is actually a 3D reconstruction of a high-pressure frozen HeLa cell, acquired with a focused ion beam scanning electron microscope.

The different-coloured structures show different parts of the HeLa cell. Anna Steyer, a former PhD student in the Schwab team at EMBL Heidelberg, captured this image. She has coloured mitochondria (blue), endosomes/lysosomes (yellow/red), and the Golgi apparatus (green).

Images like this one help researchers to fulfil EMBL’s mission: to explore the molecular world, to provide the technologies that enable this, and to distribute both the technological know-how and the acquired knowledge around the world.

If you have a stunning picture of your science, your lab or your site, you can submit it to mathias.jaeger@embl.de.

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Tags: hela, picture of the week