Under the Microscope

In this video we see a killer T cell of the immune system attacking a cancer cell.

Professor Gillian Griffiths:

“Cells of the immune system protect the body against pathogens. If cells in our bodies are infected by viruses, or become cancerous, then killer cells of the immune system identify and destroy the affected cells. Cytotoxic T cells are very precise and efficient killers. They are able to destroy infected or cancerous cells, without destroying healthy cells surrounding them. The Wellcome Trust funded laboratory of Professor Gillian Griffiths, at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, investigates just how this is accomplished. By understanding how this works, we can develop ways to control killer cells. This will allow us to find ways to improve cancer therapies, and ameliorate autoimmune diseases caused when killer cells run amok and attack healthy cells in our bodies.”

Cytotoxic T cells are just 10 microns in length: approximately one-tenth the width of a human hair. These movies are 92 times real time.

The original footage shown was made by Alex Ritter, a PhD student on the NIH-OxCam programme, in the laboratory of Professor Gillian Griffiths at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research and the Department of Medicine of the Clinical School of the University of Cambridge. The images were acquired using an Andor Revolution spinning disk system with an Olympus microscope. Professor Griffiths is a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow.

Links for more information:

http://www.cimr.cam.ac.uk

http://www.immunology.cam.ac.uk/about

Music by Intercontinental Music Lab

http://www.intercontinentalmusiclab.com

In this video Dr Beverley Glover explains how a daisy is a collection of tiny flowers grouped together to make it look like a single big flower.

Dr Glover:

“The flowering plants (Angiosperms) form the dominant vegetation over most of the Earth’s land surface. They are found in all habitats except the Antarctic, and can tolerate an extraordinarily wide range of environmental conditions. All major human food crops are Angiosperms. We are interested in the evolution and development of the flower, one of the defining features of Angiosperms. The evolution of flowers changed the way in which plants reproduced, allowing them to use animals to carry their pollen around. Our research is particularly focussed on understanding how the features that make flowers attractive to insects evolved, and what the genetic control of their development is. We hope to be able to use this knowledge to improve pollination and yield of important crop plants and to help protect the great diversity of flowers and insect pollinators in the wild.

This image of a developing daisy flower head is part of our work on understanding different ways of attracting pollinators. All the plants in the daisy family use the same trick – by clustering together many tiny flowers they produce a structure that looks just like a single big flower. The daisies that grow in our lawns contain two different types of flowers – central radially symmetrical yellow ones, and an outer ring of bilaterally symmetrical white ones with a massively elongated petal structure. In this Scanning Electron Micrograph you can see the central yellow flowers at a very early stage of development, with the petals still folded over the centre of each little flower.”

Each of the round structures that will go on to be an individual flower is about 200 micrometres in diameter, or 1/5 of a millimetre. The whole image is about 1mm across.

Dr Glover’s profile:

http://www.plantsci.cam.ac.uk/research/beverleyglover.html

Department of Plant Sciences:

http://www.plantsci.cam.ac.uk

Music by Peter Nickalls:

http://www.peternickalls.com

Dr Tim Wilkinson is combining liquid crystals with nanotechnology to try and create 3D displays which would look like real life.

Dr Wilkinson: “Liquid crystal displays are now a commonplace technology from mobile phone displays to wide screen televisions. They are, however, still limited by the shape, size and speed of their pixels when they are used to display video images. This video shows microscope sequences of a new nanotechnology based liquid crystal pixel structure that will allow much higher resolution displays and even true 3D holographic displays to be fabricated in the future.”

The videos are all in real time. The scale varies from video to video, but the little dots which form a grid in most of them are all 10 μm apart (10th of diameter of a hair).

More info:

http://www-g.eng.cam.ac.uk/CMMPE/displays2d.html

Department of Engineering:

www.eng.cam.ac.uk

Music by Intercontinental Music Lab

http://www.intercontinentalmusiclab.com

In this video, we see a mouse embryo developing. Erica Watson tells us that studying this process helps us better understand human pregnancy.

Erica Watson:

“The development of a fetus is elegant yet complex. Amazingly, most fetuses undergo a highly orchestrated sequence of events during development to produce a healthy baby. This suggests that a baby can adapt to changes in the womb, such as to the availability of nutrients from its mother. But how do these environmental changes affect the baby’s health in later life? And is it possible that these adverse changes will alter the development of generations to follow? In other words, does the environment that a baby develops in affect its grandchildren’s growth and development? Our research aims to understand these questions using a mouse model with a genetic mutation that prevents the normal breakdown folic acid (a vitamin). This mutation alters the metabolism of a mouse and causes long-lasting effects on the generations to come. Our hope is to find out how environmental changes caused by a genetic mutation are perpetuated into subsequent generations, even when these generations do not carry the mutation.

Since humans and mice use similar genes during development, we can get valuable information from a mouse model about how an embryo and its placenta develop over time. Compared to a human pregnancy that lasts nine months, a mouse fetus develops quickly, taking only three weeks to get from a one-cell embryo to a fully-grown mouse pup. Using a light microscope, we generated this image showing the growth and development of a mouse embryo during the second week of pregnancy. The first embryo is nine days old and has few recognizable features whereas the last embryos is fourteen days old and more closely resembles a mouse pup as birth. Understanding the progression of normal developmental processes will ultimately help us explain the events that cause fetal development to go awry resulting in miscarriage or stillbirth.”

The smallest fetus in the video is the thickness of a penny and the largest one is the size of a blueberry.

More information:

http://www.trophoblast.cam.ac.uk/people/watson.shtml

Department of Physiology, Development and Neurosciences:

http://www.pdn.cam.ac.uk/

Graduate School of Life Sciences:

http://www.biomed.cam.ac.uk/gradschool

Music by Peter Nickalls:

http://www.peternickalls.com

In this video Dr Chris Forman shows us his incredible images of a fruit fly foot and beetle antenna.

Dr Forman:

"Nature has found remarkable ways of using small amounts of energy to combine common elements such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen into fascinating and complex assemblies like these insects shown here. If we could do the same in our manufacturing processes then perhaps we could recycle our products more easily and we wouldn't use as much energy processing large lumps of aluminium, concrete and plastic. My research into biomaterials tries to learn from nature how to combine the same basic materials into a wide range of structures that perhaps, one day, may be used in all kinds of products from food to factories!"

Size of these images:

μm = micron (one thousandth of a millimetre).

Fruit fly foot: 50 μm across (thin strand of human hair).

Antenna: 60-70 μm across (strand of human hair).

More info about this research:

http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/?p=24151

More images:

http://flic.kr/s/aHsjwMhSFd

Dr Chris Forman's profile:

http://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/people/cjf41

Thanks to Dr Bill O'Neill and Dr Paul Barker.

Department of Engineering:

http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk

Music by Joe Snape:

http://www.larmlicht.wordpress.com

Find more Cambridge research here:

http://www.cam.ac.uk/research

In the first of this microscopic video series, Dr Chris Forman shows us the eye of a beetle and the eye of a fruit fly and explains how they have inspired technology.

Dr Forman:

“Nature has found remarkable ways of using small amounts of energy to combine common elements such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen into fascinating and complex assemblies like these insects shown here. If we could do the same in our manufacturing processes then perhaps we could recycle our products more easily and we wouldn't use as much energy processing large lumps of aluminium, concrete and plastic. My research into biomaterials tries to learn from nature how to combine the same basic materials into a wide range of structures that perhaps, one day, may be used in all kinds of products from food to factories!”

Size of these images:

μm = micron (one thousandth of a millimetre)

Beetle eye: each individual lens is 12 μm (the thickness of cling film), the entire eye is about 750 μm across (thickness of 5 sheets of paper) and the entire image is about 240 μm across (really thick bit of human hair).

Fruit fly eye: Again each lens is about 10 μm (thickness of cling film), and the entire eye is about 200-300 μm (3 sheets of paper). The total distance across the image is about 115 μm across (thickness of a human hair).

More info:

cam.ac.uk/research/?p=24151

More images:

flic.kr/s/aHsjwMhSFd

Dr Forman’s profile:

ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/people/cjf41

Thanks to Dr Bill O’Neill and Dr Paul Barker.

Department of Engineering:

eng.cam.ac.uk

Music by Joe Snape:

larmlicht.wordpress.com