This award-winning photo invites you to look deep into the eyes of the fruit fly.
The magnified image shows some of the hundreds of the structures called ommatidia that make up the compound eye of Drosophila melanogaster. Cell nuclei are stained blue, proteins called cadherin are red and a glycoprotein called chaoptin, found in the photoreceptors, is green.
The image won Karin Panser, a neuroscientist from the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria, the first prize in the Huygens Image Contest 2013 for microscopic images. She uses detailed pictures like this on to understand how the fly processes visual signals.
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