MICROSCOPIC WORLD

1st place: Water flea
This eerily beautiful image of a water flea with its bright green "crown of thorns" takes the top prize in the 2009 Olympus BioScapes competition. The exoskeletal crown helps protect the flea against predators. This image, created by University of Albrecht zoologist Jan Michels, reveals not only the exoskeleton but also interior detail - right down to the nuclei within its cells, seen as tiny, glowing blue dots.

2nd place: Plant cell nucleus
This second-place image from Berkeley's Chung-Ju Rachel Wang shows a ladderlike protein structure inside the nucleus of a corn plant cell. The structure, known as a synaptonemal complex, forms between pairing chromosomes during cell division. This may be the first-ever high-resolution 3-D image of this complex ever captured with light microscopy. The two parallel axes of this complex, which run the length of each chromosome, are seen as two threads spaced as little as 100 nanometers apart and twisting around each other in a helix.

3rd place: Microbial sex
This is a sequence of stills taken from a movie titled "Sexual Attraction in Spyrogyra." The movie, produced by the University of Melbourne's Jeremy Pickett-Heaps, depicts sexual reproduction in simple algae captured in time-lapse video over two hours. One cell becomes quite amoeboid as it squeezes through the narrow fertilization tube that the partner cells have just built between them. The movie won third place in the 2009 Olympus BioScapes contest.

4th place: Freshwater algae
The University of Washington's Charles Krebs used phase contrast microscopy to create this 100x image of freshwater algae (Haematococcus pluvialis). The species is known for its ability to synthesize a red pigment known as astaxanthin, which has powerful antioxidant properties. This picture won fourth place in the 2009 Olympus BioScapes competition.

5th place: Poisoned algae
This image, created by Skidmore College biologist David Domozych, shows one-celled Penium algae that are breaking apart after treatment with a microtubule poison known as oryzalin. The picture won fifth place in the 2009 Olympus BioScapes contest.

6th place: Man o' War tentacle
Notorious for its painful, powerful sting, the Portuguese Man o' War has a gas-filled floating chamber that supports tentacles with stinging cells. Here you can see the pink batteries of stinging cells and a delicate muscular band that is responsible for the high contractibility of the tentacles. The image by the University of Sao Paulo's Alvaro Migotto won sixth place in the 2009 Olympus BioScapes contest.

7th place: Brainbow
Long, slender nerve fibers known as axons cover the tail of a 3-day-old larval zebrafish in this "Brainbow" image, created using confocal microscopy. In the Brainbow technique, cells randomly pick up combinations of red, yellow and cyan fluorescent proteins so that they each glow in a particular color. This provides a way to distinguish between neighboring cells in the nervous system and follow their pathways. The image by Harvard's Albert Pan won seventh place in the Olympus BioScapes contest.

8th place: Uncommon flower
Heiti Paves, a researcher at Estonia's Tallinn University of Technology, used confocal microscopy to capture this uncommon image of a single Arabidopsis thaliana flower. Arabidopsis thaliana, also known as thale cress, is a common model organism in plant biology and genetics. The picture won eighth place in the 2009 Olympus BioScapes contest.

Ninth place: Salmon embryos
Haruki Fujimake of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts captured this colorful closeup of Atlantic salmon embryos from Bryant Pond, Maine. The image won ninth place in the 2009 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition.

10th place: Neurons
The 2009 Olympus BioScapes Imaging Competition showcases microscopic photos and movies of life science subjects. This image by Gist Croft and Mackenzie Weygandt of Columbia University and Project ALS won 10th place in the contest. It shows motor neurons affected by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. To create these neurons, skin cells were taken from an 83-year-old ALS patient and reprogrammed to become induced pluripotent stem cells. Those cells were then transformed into neurons. Studying such neurons will help scientists combat ALS.