Even the flooring used in the LMB’s atrium has a scientific story to tell about geology and evolutionary biology as it is littered with beautiful fossils. This ammonite for day 63 of #LMB365 was spotted by our Head of Health & safety outside her office. The floor is made from Jura limestone tiles, 600mm x 1000mm x 30mm thick from a quarry in Bavaria.
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LMB 365 – Day 62
When troubleshooting problems with the LMB’s fluorescence microscopes the Light Microscopy Facility sometimes use lens tissue as a test sample since there is always some to hand. Normally they use scientific cameras to take images, which do not see the whole image that comes out of the microscope body and therefore crop the image to a square (or rectangle). On this occasion Jon Howe decided to take an image down the eyepiece with his phone camera allowing him to capture the whole field of view – hence the round image for day 62 of #LMB365.
LMB 365 – Day 61
Patterns and shapes in everyday objects can be seen on day 61 of #LMB365 which is a photo of some of the R8 milling collets in the LMB’s Technical Instrumentation Workshop. These hold milling cutters concentric to the spindle in a very tight grip. They are used daily and are now mainly metric by size, although a set of imperial collets are still in use.
LMB 365 – Day 60
This image for day 60 of #LMB365 shows a handful of pseudocoloured hippocampal neurons (brain cells) that have been specifically targeted with DNA expressing a fluorescent protein which has allowed Jake Watson to visualise them. In Ingo Greger’s group in the Neurobiology Division they modify specific cells in order to understand how synapses, the sites of communication between cells, transmit information.
LMB 365 – Day 59
On day 59 of #LMB365 we have a close-up of a large scale oligonucleotide synthesiser used by John Sutherland’s group in the LMB’s PNAC Division to make sufficient amounts of RNA oligonucleotides for NMR experiments to investigate the sort of chemistry they think might have taken place on early Earth.
LMB 365 – Day 58
Pictured for day 58 of #LMB365 are the basal stress fibres of Caco-2 cells, a model for the epithelial cells that line the human colon. These stress fibres are made of bundles of the cytoskeletal protein actin (red) as well as the motor protein myosin (yellow) and vinculin (blue) that links these fibres to anchoring points in the plasma membrane. Jesse Peterson in Katja Röper’s lab in the Cell Biology Division uses these cells to study how tissues like the colon epithelium establish and maintain their critical barrier function.