Photomicrography Reveals The World’s Smallest Wonders

Our Epidermas

This image took home first place at the 2017 Nikon Competition. It is an photo of something all of us have, but it doesn’t look quite the same to the naked eye. The technical description of the subject is immortalized human skin cells (HaCaT keratinocytes) expressing fluorescently tagged keratin. In layman terms—our skin. A skin cell to be exact, that has an excessive amount of keratin in it, which is fluorescently labeled in yellow. Dr. Bram van den Broek from The Netherlands Cancer Institute came across it while conducting research with Andriy Volkov, a student in the Cell Biophysics group.