Winners of International Microscopy Competition

The competition was sponsored by Olympus Optical Co. (Hamburg, Germany) and the journal Nature. Entries were sought from any microscopist, working with any microscope, of original photomicrographs of outstanding quality. Submissions came from all over the world.

The winner of the first prize was Alexey Khodjakov, a research scientist at the Wadsworth Center in Albany, New York (USA). His image of a dividing newt lung cell shows the major structural components of the mitotic spindle that is central to the process of cell division.

Second prize was won by Eric Cho of the Chinese University in Hong Kong for an image of a hamster retina. His entry shows the close relationship between the axons of the retinal ganglion cells that carry light signals to the brain and the astrocytes and blood vessels. Jason Hilton, a research fellow in palaeobotany and evolutionary plant biology at the University of Cardiff (Wales), won third prize. His remarkable image of a fossil seed nearly 300 million years old, from the Natural History Museum in London, shows
cellular detail similar to that seen in specimens prepared from living plants.




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