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Imagery has had a powerful role in science from the get-go, when the likes of Leeuwenhoek, Hooke, and Galileo added artistic illustrations to their written expositions on what they were seeing through their magnifying and telescopic lenses. For the past 32 years, Nikon Instruments has been holding an annual photomicrograph competition to celebrate the beauty and diversity of the visual data that microscope-wielding researchers have been producing in myriad fields, among them chemistry, materials science, botany, entomology, medicine, and microbiology.
Below are a few of the more molecular-science-related micrographs that were among this year???s 20 winning and 16 honorable-mention entries in the Small World Competition. They were chosen from more than 1,700 entrants by a panel of five judges, among them Sir Harold W. Kroto, whose discovery of fullerenes earned him a share of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and Michael Davidson, director of the optical and mangneto-optical imaging center at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Florida State University. He also runs the informative and eye-catching Molecular Expressions website. The winners were announced on Sept. 21.
Healing Jewels. When Melissa K. Santala, a graduate student in materials science at the University of California, Berkeley, bonded two sapphire substrates to one another under high temperature and pressure, she knew the interface would be far from perfect. She also knew that a heat treatment known as annealing would mobilize the atoms in the substrates and interesting changes would occur. "Basically, the sapphire begins to rearrange and heal," says Santala, who has used sapphire as a model system to investigate how surface energies, heat, and other factors affect the morphology of ceramic materials. In this photomicrograph, orange regions correspond to areas where the sapphire substrates??? aluminum and oxygen atoms have been moving and reassembling to fill in what had been a larger gap. The image spans a distance of about 1 mm. This micrograph earned 10th place in this year???s competition.
Liquid Polygons. It may look like an abstract jigsaw puzzle in twisted Escherian space, but it???s actually a self-organized arrangement of almost square, liquid-crystal domains floating on a liquid bed of glycerin. The interplay of the molecular orientations in the liquid crystal (pentyl cyanobiphenyl), of the interfaces between the glycerin and liquid crystal, light, and of polarizing filters determines whether a domain is dark or light, smooth or rippled. "This work is coming from our fundamental interest in the behavior of liquid crystal in confined geometries," says chemist and photomicrographer Oleg D. Lavrentovich of the Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University. Each domain of the 100-nm-thick films spans about 200 µm. Lavrentovich's image took 20th place in this year's competition.
Molecular Repairman. If you want to determine whether a DNA-repair protein slides smoothly along DNA molecules in search of sites that need fixing, or whether it uses more of a hopping motion, then you might use an apparatus like the one that Harvard University graduate student Paul C. Blainey uses and has captured in this photomicrograph. The tangle of spaghetti-like lines and the air bubbles demarcate imperfections in the contact between a sheet of double-sided sticky tape sandwiched between two glass plates. The clear, dark lane marks a portion of the tape that was cut away. The cometlike feature in the middle is a magnified depiction of actual data from an experiment in which individual, fluorescently tagged molecules of a repair protein, human oxoguanine DNA glycosylase 1, were tracked as they moved along stretches of DNA in a solution squeezing through the tape-free lane. Their trajectories, which are smooth rather than choppy, are depicted as thin white lines. The comet shape emerges because of drag imposed by the buffer as it flows through the channel. The macroscopic flow channel apparatus was viewed under ??only 10x magnification, whereas the superimposed data in the channel depict molecule-scale entities. The image earned 13th place in the 2006 Small World Competition.
Diagnosing Metal. This metal part made from a proprietary white cast iron called Nihard underwent a quick and injurious bout of high wear and ended up failing prematurely. "This material is supposed to be very hard and hence suitable for wear purposes," notes Stephen M. Harvey of Alcoa World Alumina, in Kwinana, Australia. In this photomicrograph, which was among those given honorable mention in the 2006 Small World Competition, the white phases correspond to the material's metal carbide. The black phase denotes the presence of graphite, even though the carbonaceous material should have dissolved into the white phase to elicit the hardness the material was supposed to have. "The image shows that the heat treatment of this alloy was incorrect," Harvey says. The original image was taken at magnification of 200x.
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