Winner of WSC23: Microscopy images, some other really cool photos in there!
WSC23 is the 2023 version of https://www.wikisciencecompetition.org/, billed as "The Wikipedia photo contest around science". You can click around at the link and see lots of really cool images.
The author's comment for this picture:
Since I was a little girl, I knew I wanted to understand why leaves are green, how fish swim and how the heart beats. One of the first childhood memories I have is the day my parents took me with five years old to visit the Museum of Natural History of Paris, and I saw this huge whale skeleton suspended in the air. I dreamed about it for years, telling myself that I had to understand the origin of life.
Later, my passion for photography and traveling, made the perfect link with my work. My specialty is cell biology, and more specifically the study of basic cell mechanisms and embryo development using marine models. The ocean has always fascinated me, because its organisms have completely magical ways of adapting to extreme environments. On top of that, they can be useful for understanding fundamental biological mechanisms that also apply to humans!
Currently working at the Institut Jacques Monod in the Nicolas Minc Team (CNRS, Paris), I’m using sea urchin embryos to study the mechanisms that regulate the orientation of cell divisions, a phenomenon linked to human cancer development. This is exactly what we see in this microscopy acquisition. In turquoise we see the membranes of dividing cells, in red the microtubules that serve as “ropes” to pull the chromosomes, and in green the DNA in the form of chromosomes.
Looks like the 2025 competition is over now, and you can see some of the photos already uploaded here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Science_Competition_2025#Uploaded_files
