Tiny Universes

While I've written before that straight-up scientific images -- as pretty as they can be -- are not necessarily art, they can most certainly be inspiring.   Canadian biologists Eric Lecuyer and Henry Krause have recently published a stunning image of genetic material in fruit fly embryos that challenges boundaries between scientific images and visual art.

View the full sized image here (warning: 27MB file, but well worth seeing!).

Lecuyer et al. published the image for the cover of the Oct. 5, 2007 issue of Cell journal, which contains a corresponding article about their research.  The image shows the separation of genetic material during several stages of Drosophila (fruit fly) embryonic development.  The researchers were testing how much the distribution of messenger RNA (mRNA) dictates the distribution of proteins in a cell.  Using high resolution imaging, they found a strong correlation between mRNA localization and protein localization, showing that mRNA is a major influence on cellular organization, and thus cellular growth and differentiation as well.

The blue in the images correspond to mRNA, while the red shows the cell nuclei.  The mRNA and cell nuclei were stained, and the color was applied artificially using image analysis software.  The images in the article are red and green, which the researchers say provided the best contrast, suggesting that the red and blue combination must have been chosen for the cover for aesthetic reasons. 

The embryo images are not only visually stunning in terms of color, luminosity, complexity, detail, and abstract patterning, but provide several layers of conceptual meaning.  First, it doesn't take a biologist to recognize the exquisitely detailed mitosis (cell separation) occuring in several of the embryos.  This is the fundamental process of reproduction in animals, and seeing it occur in relation to an entire embryo conveys a breathtaking sense of scale.  Secondly, and maybe this has to do with my experience in astrophysics, the embryo images strongly conjure up all-sky images of the night sky, particularly the cosmic microwave background (CMB) shown to the left, that has been such a hot research topic in the past couple decades.  The embryo images suggest windows into the tiny universes of a new organisms.  Swirling luminescent material, bright points of dense nuclei, and fuzzy blobs of diffuse substances all suggest a strong connection between the tiny and the vast, and our bodies and the universe.

Is the image art?  I believe it could pass for art if presented as such, but that said, I think there is much more an artist could do with these images than the scientists have done that would bring out the conceptual issues I described, and quite possibly even more.
 
On that note, the researchers have a beautiful online database of their embryo images sorted by gene.  Click any gene and it pulls up stunning high resolution images that show the genetic expressions.



CMB photo from Astronomy Picture of the Day.