Honorable Mention: A Taste for Fruit

Photo by Gregory Macleod, Ph.D., associate professor Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College

Not a tongue, but rather, part of the brain of a living fruit fly maggot that allows it to crawl through an apple, peach or banana. Blue reveals the soup inside each nerve cell, while red (or magenta) and green reveal two different organelles within each cell, the mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum. These colors represent the true fluorescent colors of the proteins labelling different structures within each nerve cell of the living animal. Our ability to genetically modify fruit flies make them invaluable in studies into the genetic basis of neurodegenerative diseases.