Author: Kristel Dancel-Manning, BFA, MS
Core Facility: NYU Medical Center's Microscopy Lab
Specimen: mouse muscle fibers
Core Facility: NYU Medical Center's Microscopy Lab
]]>As members of New York University’s Microscopy Lab, Alice Liang, the director, Chris Petzold, the lab manager, and myself worked in tandem to design, process, section, and image these samples. We followed a standard TEM processing protocol to preserve the tissue before embedding it in resin. Once polymerized, the blocks were sectioned onto TEM grids and stained with uranyl acetate (UA) and lead citrate. This process can take from 2-3 weeks to complete depending on the workload of the core.
Imaging was done on a Philips CM12 TEM with Gatan camera.
We collaborated with Julien Oury and his PI Steve Burden to ensure the TEM images captured representative regions of interest from both healthy and mutant mice.
We focused specifically on longitudinal muscle fibers displaying mitochondria and t-tubules and found a visible difference between the morphology and organization of these particular organelles in the different mouse groups. Once all parties were in agreement about the results, we chose one of the best, most representative TEM images from the healthy mouse to color and submit for the journal cover.
I used Adobe Photoshop to highlight different components of the muscle fibers (red and orange) as well as the mitochondria and t-tubules (purple). I think muscle tissue is one of the most visually pleasing tissues to image with TEM. The patterns are almost hypnotizing.
For me, imaging wasn’t the hard part of this project—instead, it was choosing which image to color out of the dozens of beautiful ones we collected. Finding which color combinations work together is the next hurdle. I tried various combinations before settling on this one, and I’m happy with the results.
Author: Kristel Dancel-Manning, BFA, MS
Microscope: Philips CM12 TEM with Gatan 4k camera
Specimen: mouse muscle fibers
Core Facility: NYU Medical Center’s Microscopy Lab
]]>This can be as small as single changes in the nucleotide bases of DNA, which are known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs).
As well as contributing to our physical features, these changes can mean that certain individuals, or populations are more or less susceptible to a disease.
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) aim to identify these differences, and usually present this complex data in a scatterplot known as a Manhattan plot.
In this beautiful illustration of the Manhattan skyline :
Each window represents an SNP
The position along the x axis represents the genomic location
Each building represents a chromosome
The y axis shows the likelihood of a SNP being associated with the trait in question (the higher dot, the higher the probability)
Thank you to 
Gurmannat “Mannat” Kalra, molecular medicine PhD student at University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB). Biology is her passion. Gurmannat creates interpretive paintings to make biological concepts easier to understand and remember.
Corals are made of colonies of polyps and have three ways to increase their numbers:
Asexual reproduction, where “parental” polyps bud to boost numbers within a colony Fragmentation, when a section of coral falls away to establish a new colony Sexual reproduction by spawning or by brooding
Sexual reproduction by brooding (as illustrated) can be important for the coral to increase genetic variation, but another major advantage is that it forms new colonies far away from the parental one.
The corals coordinate this process by the phases of the moon with sperm released (1) during the new moon and the larvae released (4) at the full moon, after a period of brooding in the polyps (2-4).
The larvae are then dispersed on the ocean currents until they find a home to begin developing a new colony.
Thank you to 
Lucia Garces, fellow demonstrator and scientific illustrator at St. George’s University. She’s also a graphic designer and nature lover.
Lucia made this image for Stephen Nimrod, assistant professor in the Department of Biology, Ecology & Conservation.
Finding and developing environmentally friendly battery materials is a growing venture. The image illustrates an experiment that combined forest-based nanocellulose, the organic red dye molecule alizarin, and conductive polymers to successfully fashion a battery with an impressive ability to hold an electric charge (>400 F g-1) and good stability (>1000 cycles). The alizarin, originally derived from plant roots and used historically to dye textiles, improves energy storage, while nanocellulose provides a nonporous and mechanically strong network for the polymers.
Thank you to Robert Brooke, PhD, co-founder of 
Conceptualized.tech, who created the illustration, which was used for the cover of the Advanced Sustainable Systems Journal, vol 8, issue 8, 2019. Robert describes himself as a “scientist by day, 3D modeler/graphic designer by night.”
#sustainability#imagenscienceadventcalendar#batteries#entrepeneurship
The illustration shows the conformational changes of the highly dynamic spike protein of the virus:
“Prefusion conformation”: the spike protein binds to the cellular receptor ACE2 and attaches to the cell membrane.
“Prehairpin and transient conformation”: cellular proteases cleave the spike protein inducing dramatical conformational changes on its structure.
“Postfusion state”: fusion with the cellular membrane and release of the viral genome.
Thank you to 
Gloria Fuentes, who left her postdoc to try out scientific illustration and has now founded her own company, 
The Visual Thinker.
You can read more about Gloria here.
Perhaps, after a day exploring and (carefully!) touching creatures in the tide pools of Canada’s Gulf Islands, using a computer to craft an image of nature’s wonders just didn’t feel right to Bea Martin. Though adept at digital illustration, on this day Bea reached for her colored pencils and watercolors to depict by hand the many species that survive in the challenging intertidal zone.
“I sketched with Col-erase Tuscan Red and Brown on toned, tan paper,” Bea says. “Then I added a mix of watercolor and gouache.” Once at home, Bea consulted the New Beachcomber’s guide to the Pacific Northwest, by J. Duane Sept, to identify purple stars, crabs, chitons and more.
The result is a page from Bea’s naturalist notebook, shown here.
Thank you to Beatriz Martin, a character animator, certified medical illustrator (CMI), nature sketcher, and Fulbright Scholar with a medical background living in the U.S.
With curiosity and enthusiasm, her goal is to craft entertaining, inspiring and educational stories, merging art with science in both digital and traditional media.
Compared to our egg-laying ancestors, this evolutionary step affords the fetus greater protection within the mother, and has led to a dramatic expansion in brain development.
But it might surprise you to know that an ancient retrovirus was, in part, responsible for this breakthrough.
The syncytiotrophoblast (depicted in the second panel):
⚆ A acts as a barrier between the placenta and the maternal tissue.
⚆ Contains a protein called syncytin that allows this barrier to form, and which originated from the envelope protein of a retrovirus!
⚆ is essential to maintain a close relationship where nutrients and gases can be exchanged, whilst ensuring feto-maternal tolerance and immune suppression.
⚆is a multinucleate cell layer of fetal origin.
Thank you to Antonio García Gómez. Antonio, holds a PhD in Biochemistry and he is a scientific illustrator passionate about translating scientific messages into effective and engaging illustrations.
The poison is acquired during the larval stage of the lifecycle.
As in the famous book “The Hungry Caterpillar,” 
this is the main feeding stage.
Although the larvae have a generalist diet, they acquire poison from eating plants containing toxins known as Pyrrolizidine alkaloids.
The larvae convert these plant-derived toxins into insect-specific toxins such as callimorphine.
As illustrated, the lifecycle of the Garden Tiger Moth:
Eggs hatch in late summer, as the previous generation of adults dies.
The insects survive winter as small larvae; in spring they begin eating and grow into a large caterpillars known as “Woolly Bears” due to the hairs on their back.
By June the caterpillars explore low vegetation and spin a cocoon there from their hairs and silk.
In summer, with the metamorphosis complete, the adult moth emerges.
Thank you to 
Brian Dall Schyth, a high school teacher and freelance Illustrator; owner of ExplainWays. This illustration was made for the Museum of Natural History in Aarhus as part of the 99 species project.
A major reason behind this proposal is that, during a process known as photosynthesis, plants take up carbon dioxide (CO2) in order to make sugars for their growth. This reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide as the carbon remains stored in the plant. For us, oxygen is a happy byproduct of these reactions, and the carbon dioxide is “captured.”
Key features of photosynthesis are:
The thylakoid membrane, in the chloroplast organelle, the location of the photosystems that absorb light
Light energy that transfers the electrons extracted from H2O to CO2, to produce carbohydrates
The carbon fixation cycle, where the ATP, NADPH and carbon dioxide are converted to sugars and starch
The illustration allows us to peer into the thylakoid membrane.
Thank you to Dmitry Shevela, a researcher at Umeå University and, a science illustrator at his own graphic design company ShevelaDesign AB.
The poster was developed in collaboration with Prof. Govindjee Govindjee, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“Brown skin can have vibrant colors, like orange, red, purple, blue, green, and a variety of undertones,” says Hillary Wilson. But without this knowledge, illustrators risk creating darker-skinned individuals who are dull, flat, and lifeless.
In skin tone ball studies, which she calls “roadmaps for how the skin would look on a theoretical face,” Hillary experiments with colors, light and shadow, and practices making scars, wounds, and freckles on darker-skinned individuals.
Melanin, a pigment that contributes to the colour of our skin, is produced and packaged by membrane-bound structures called melanosomes that are:
made by the melanocytes cells & transferred and positioned above the nucleus of keratinocytes cells to protect their #DNA against UV damage
5 times more dense and larger in highly pigmented skin
isolated and dispersed through all the layers in darker skin, compared with only being in the basal layer in lighter skin tones
Thank you to Hillary Wilson, in her work she focuses on visual storytelling, and celebrating the rich variation in everyday people