The Nikon Small World competition has been celebrating the beauty in the teeny-tiny for almost 50 years, and this year's winners have officially been announced.
The University of Geneva's Grigorii Timin took first place in the 2022 competition with an extreme close-up of the embryonic hand of a Madagascar giant day gecko, captured and curated through high-resolution microscopy and image-stitching.
There were more than 1,300 entries from over 70 countries around the world — including Australia, with three Aussie entries featuring in the 20 top-ranked images.
1: The embryonic hand of a Madagascar giant day gecko
2: Breast tissue showing contractile myoepithelial cells wrapped around milk-producing alveoli
One of those was Dr Caleb Dawson from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, who says he was "stunned" to snag second place.
"I enter every year and have been grateful to make it into the top 100 a few times and be a part of this great celebration of life's beauty," he says.
"What I love most about it is that more people get to see the incredible microscopic landscapes that I get to study every day. It's a privilege to do this work and a joy to share it with others."
3: Blood vessel networks in an adult mouse's intestine
4: A long-bodied cellar spider (pholcus phalangioides), commonly known as a daddy long-legs
Dr Dawson's image of contractile myoepithelial cells wrapped around milk-producing alveoli in breast tissue was captured with a confocal microscope.
"We set it [the microscope] up to scan thousands of images overnight, generating hundreds of GB of data. We then combined all of these images in graphics software to build the 3D image that you see here," he says.
"We captured this as part of our research effort to discover the ways that immune cells keep the breast and breastfeeding babies healthy, and how immune cells fight against breast cancer."
5: Lamproderma, or slime mould
6: Unburned carbon particles released when the hydrocarbon chain of candle wax breaks down
Dr Dawson says his entry is an example of what 1mm of healthy breast tissue in lactation looks like.
"I used yellow and magenta fluorescent dyes that bind to molecules in the muscle-like cells (F-actin and Keratin 5). I had to make the tissue transparent like glass so that the microscope could see the fluorescence deep inside the tissue to capture a 3D view," he explains.
"I use these unusual colours because I don't see colours the way most people do and can't distinguish the reds and greens often used in microscopy. Everyone can see these colours clearly, so more people can appreciate it."
7: Human neurons derived from neural stem cells
8: Growing tip of a red alga
Another of the Australian entries by marine scientist and PhD candidate Brett Lewis has a distinctly Australian subject matter to it — his image of a coral polyp came in 12th place.
The picture is the product of weeks of planning, collection, sampling, experimentation, staining and preservation as part of research into coral growth and reproduction.
The sample you'll see below was collected by the Australian Institute of Marine Science and tested at a research aquarium at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane — and the polyp itself is only about the size of the head of a small nail.
9: Liquid crystal mixture
10: A fly under the chin of a tiger beetle
The photo Mr Lewis submitted to Small World was captured with an inverted confocal fluorescence microscope — and there's no telling what it looks like until the very end of the process.
"It takes 36 hours to capture that photo you see, which is somewhere between 60 and 74 images that are all stacked together, and there's only a small amount of information in each image," he says.
"But we don't know until they're stacked together what the image will look like, so you can waste weeks' worth of effort and 36 hours worth of imaging on that."
11: Moth eggs
12: Autofluorescence of a single coral polyp
Mr Lewis has been developing this sampling process for high-detail coral imaging for the last four or five years, and it's one of many ways researchers are learning more about coral biology and health.
"Basically it blasts the coral with these lasers and excites the proteins within the tissue, and those proteins will fluoresce. That's the signal that comes back to us and that's what you see here, lasers hitting all the different individual cells, and those cells' proteins reflecting that fluorescence back to us," he says.
"We want to understand the underlying biology to critical functions within the coral, and to do that we have to look at a broader range of microscopy techniques and bring out the clear picture."
13: An agatized dinosaur bone
14: Differentiated cultured mouse myoblasts
You can see the lysosomes in green, nuclei in yellow and F-actin in magenta:
Both Mr Lewis and Dr Dawson say their favourite entry this year was the winning photo — the embryonic hand of a Madagascar giant day gecko.
"It's unreal … that is just a phenomenal image that I think is just absolutely fantastic," Mr Lewis says.
"I love the effect of the nerves winding and reaching around the bones and tendons," Dr Dawson agrees.
"Seeing how incredibly complex life is at the microscopic scale makes me wonder how we are here at all."
15: Cross sections of normal human colon epithelial crypts
16: Longitudinal section through the tip of a a white asparagus shoot
Australia was also represented in the top 20 by Dr Jianqun Gao alongside neuroscientist Professor Glenda Halliday from the University of Sydney's Faculty of Medicine and Health.
Their image of human neurons derived from neural stem cells ranked in seventh place.
Professor Halliday and Dr Jianqun also submitted an entry in last year's Small World competition, also of human neurons derived from NSCs, which was named an Image of Distinction.
17: The tail fin of a zebrafish larva
You can see the peripheral nerves in green and extracellular matrix in violet:
18: A network of macrophages (white blood cells) of an adult zebrafish intestine
This year's competition was judged by cell biologist Dr Clare Waterman, New York Times senior video journalist Dr Nikolay Nikolov, Associate Professor Dr Gustav Menezes from the Federal University of Minas Gerais's Center for Gastrointestinal Biology, and Washington Post photo editor Annaliese Nurnberg.
Nikon Instruments' Eric Flem says Small World is an intersection between art and science.
"This year’s competition highlights stunning imagery from scientists, artists, and photomicrographers of all experience levels and backgrounds from across the globe," he says.
"Each year, Nikon Small World receives an array of microscopic images that exhibit exemplary scientific technique and artistry. This year was no exception."
