MRC WIMM Image competition

We are excited to announce the winners of the recent MRC WIMM Image Competition, organised by the MRC WIMM Postdoc Association. In total, we received 34 incredible images from 12 participants across the MRC WIMM. The subject matter varied across the submissions from images collected on microscopes within the Wolfson Imaging facility, computational renderings of images for analysis and images from across the MRC WIMM showing ‘science-in-action’.

For the difficult job of judging the competition we recruited representatives from all over the MRC WIMM. The final panel consisted of me (post-doc representative), KJ Patel (WIMM Director), Ben Fairfax (PI representative), Chris Lagerholm (Imaging Facility), Kevin Clark (FACS Facility), Caitlin O’Brien-Ball (student representative) and Petra Kiviniemi (admin representative).

All of the images were judged anonymously. When it came to judging, it was a hard call, but each judge managed to narrow it down and rank their top 5 images. From this shortlist we discussed the merits of each of the top images and decided on our winners based on three criteria:
- Aesthetics
- Image quality
- Relevance to WIMM

Our overall winner, and recipient of a £100 Amazon voucher is… Louise Johnson with her image ‘Networking’.

Whole mount immunofluorescence confocal microscopy of mouse dermis, with lymphatic vessels stained with anti-LYVE-1 (blue) and blood vessels stained with anti-perlecan (red).

The judges also chose three runners up, each winning a £50 Amazon voucher. Abdullah Khan for his image ‘Vascular Organoids’, Martin Fellermeyer for his image ‘Biocore 8K’ and Martyna Lukoseviviute for her ‘Zebrafish Embryo’ image.

Shown is the inside of the Biacore 8K during a run to analyse the affinity of nanobodies.

This is an image of the failed, but unexpectedly beautiful, experiment. A young zebrafish embryo (70% epiboly stage) was unspecifically stained for three different fluorescently labelled transcripts using the hybridisation chain reaction technique. I like this image because it resembles an image of a planet.  

- Martyna Lukoseviviute

 All of the images submitted to the competition showed incredible skill, research and ingenuity and we would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who took the time to submit their images. Additionally, I personally would like to thank the judges for their time and opinions in helping to select our winners.

Finally, we would like to note that another image submitted by Martyna Lukoseviviute, ‘The Queen Ovary’, was greatly admired by all of our judges but we felt that it did not represent current research within the WIMM. However, it is an astonishing image that we would like to share with you all.

The image displays an optical section of an ovariole (a serial unit of an ovary, female reproductive organ) of a honeybee queen pupae. Ovarioles were stained with phalloidin (in cyan) for filamentous cellular actin visualisation, cell membrane dye (in magenta) and cell nuclei (with DAPI in yellow).

All of the images submitted to the competition are available to view in a gallery.