Graphs, worms and California skies

Jagged lines jut as a result of purple-and-gold panels, manufacturing peaks of a mountainous skyline. Named “A Californian Sunset,” this graphic is additional than just visually putting — it is really a representation of postdoctoral scholar Alakananda Das‘ study.

Das investigates how our feeling of contact functions on a molecular amount, studying a kind of worm known as C. elegans as a design. The sunset-esque graphic, which was awarded 3rd position in this year’s scientific graphic levels of competition hosted by the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, is the readout of a sort of graph recognized as a kymograph, which is usually employed to visualize the movement of a molecule or particle of curiosity.

“A Californian Sunset” shows how vesicles, which are fluid-loaded buildings that transport components in a cell, shift about in C. elegans neurons, assisting reveal how they assist the worm’s feeling of touch.

I spoke to Das, who operates in the Goodman Wormsense Laboratory, to find out a lot more about how she created the impression and what led her to the intersection involving art and science.

How did you produce this picture?

I was exploring a distinct protein that is concerned in processing contact, referred to as MEC-4, in the neurons of C. elegans. Working with fluorescence microscopy, we hooked up a fluorescent protein to MEC-4, which allowed us to notice its place in neurons. I observed that some of the MEC-4 proteins ended up in vesicles that had been moving close to, which we hadn’t found right before normally, these proteins remain in preset positions alongside the neuron. This discovery clued us into how MEC-4, which is synthesized at a person close of the neuron, gets distributed all the way to the other close of the neuron, which is about half the human body duration of the overall worm.

It was very exciting, and I made a decision to choose some films of these proteins with our fluorescence microscope. The impression that you see is a compilation of kymographs produced from these movies. Kymographs are usually employed to keep track of movement in biology since they exhibit the adjust in posture of a moving molecule in excess of time. We make a kymograph by choosing and cropping out a defined region in every body of the video and lining them up facet by facet. So any attribute within the cropped region that is shifting will demonstrate up as diagonal lines.

In this image, the horizontal traces represent the fastened, unmoving MEC-4 proteins although the diagonal traces represent the going vesicles. Every single of the eight panels in this impression represents a two-moment online video the full image exhibits the movement of the vesicles around 16 minutes.

The authentic impression was in black and white, so I used Photoshop to create a personalized color map, linking sure pixels to specific colors to make the graphic of a sunset.

What inspired you to post this graphic?

I established this image very last 12 months and introduced it at a person of our lab conferences. Anyone was pretty enthusiastic about it, so I entered it into an exhibition hosted by Stanford University’s Office of Content Sciences and Engineering. Following receiving some superior suggestions, I decided to enter the graphic into this contest as properly.

To me, artwork and science go hand in hand. I am an artist — I do a whole lot of portray and acrylic renderings of all-natural landscapes. But I am also a scientist and from time to time I like to combine my two pursuits.

What do kymographs incorporate to our knowing of biology?

The primary concern that we’re trying to solution through our C. elegans investigation is how the bodily feeling of contact is processed. When your finger touches one thing, the actual physical strain applied is transformed into alerts and sent to your mind. We know that MEC-4 is a person of the important proteins that facilitates that process in worms. But we don’t know how MEC-4 is effective, which is section of what I’m seeking to determine out. Capturing the motion of MEC-4 in vesicles tells us a great deal about how this protein gets dispersed alongside these lengthy neurons, so that the neurons can method the touch stimulus applied at any point along the worm’s entire body.

Picture by Alakananda Das