Images

By carrying pollen from plant to plant in their quest for nectar, bees help to facilitate plant reproduction, giving bees an essential role in the sustainability of our agriculture.  Bee populations have been threatened over the last decade by a…

Have you ever seen the image of a face in a seemingly random set of objects or an unexpected place? This phenomenon is known as pareidolia, it’s the perception of a familiar pattern when none exists in reality. No one really knows why we see these faces,…

Plants grow in interesting ways. You may have noticed that your houseplants “lean” towards the window, seeking the sunlight. This movement towards light is called phototropism. Tropism is a general term referring to any instance of growth or movement of…

The colonies in this image display some of the diversity of pigment production in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The blue-green colonies contain a pigment called pyocyanin, which is known to be toxic to human cells and helps the bacteria establish a niche…

To get around, Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacterium use a number of motility strategies, such as twitching and gliding. In this image, we see a special kind of bacterial motility behavior known as swarming, where a mass of bacteria moves collectively across…

It may be hard to believe, but this sea of shiny, donut-shaped colonies are Pseudomonas aeruginosa colonies. These Pseudomonas colonies have a genetic mutation that causes many of the bacteria’s genes to be shut off. The donut-shape of these colonies may…

No one likes to be in crowded spaces, so when colonies reach a critical cell density, cells within the colony begin to lyse, dramatically changing the architecture of the colony. The colony on the left is a wild-type colony, while the colony on the right…

A single bacterial cell is invisible to the naked eye. As that single cell grows and divides into new cells, however, it forms a visible pile of bacteria. In microbiology, we call this pile of bacteria a colony. A colony’s appearance can indicate a lot…

In a clutch of eggs, some zebrafish are the runts of the litter and may appear younger because of their diminutive size. This is the case for the two zebrafish above. The two are in fact 5-day old siblings. At this stage of development, the zebrafish…

If you look closely at this zebrafish embryo, you will notice bright spots that look like stars covering the entire body. The nuclei of each cell in this embryo has been labeled with a fluorescent protein so when you look at the nuclei under a…