A unique international exhibition portraying microscope images as art will include six exhibits created by Dr Jason Swedlow and Dr Paul Andrews from the Division of Gene Regulation and Expression in the School of Life Sciences.
The exhibition, entitled microModern - an exhibit of art in science, opens on 11 December and runs until 20 December at the LIMN Gallery in San Francisco. The exhibition of microscopy images is the idea of Paul Millman, Vice-President of sales for Chroma Technology, who saw the art before he saw the science when looking at the microscopy images.
Six of the 37 exhibits at the microModern Exhibition are the creations of Dr Swedlow and Dr Andrews. Dr Swedlow’s image is that of a chick embryo stained for DNA (blue) and microtubules (green). The tissue is a slide for the neural tube, the embryonic structure that develops into the nervous system of the adult animal.
Dr Andrews has five different images in the exhibition, which show HeLa cancer cells captured in various stages of the cell cycle. The cells were fixed and stained with fluorescent antibodies and also have expressed in them Aurora B protein kinase linked to the jellyfish green fluorescent protein.
Paul says, "They were taken on a DeltaVision Microsocope and then software-enhanced to create an aesthetically pleasing image - so some of them bear little resemblance to a real cell!"
Dr Swedlow is a Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Trust Biocentre where his laboratory are interested in how chromosomes are assembled during cell division. This process is a known target for anti-cancer therapeutics. Jason uses both biochemistry and digital microscopy to understand how chromosomes are organised.
In the last few years, they have developed biochemical methods that allow them to probe directly the molecules that are associated with mitotic chromosomes, and have also applied high-resolution digital fluorescence microscopy to the study of the structure of the mitotic chromosome.
Dr Andrews is a postdoctoral scientist working on the functions of the Aurora B protein kinase in human cells. Part of these studies involves the use of a state-of-the-art digital deconvolution microscope (DeltaVision) for high-resolution imaging.
The exhibition is sponsored by Chroma Technology, who manufacture the specialised optical filters necessary for imaging the multitude of different fluorescent markers used in modern cell biology. Chroma Technology commissioned images from a select group of laboratories from across the globe, all specialising in state-of-the-art imaging.
All proceeds from the sale of images will be donated to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.