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Shimmering colour in a fruit fly’s eye

An award-winning photo reveals the beauty in the ranks of structures that make up a fruit fly's compound eye
Shimmering colour in a fruit fly's eye

(Image: IMP)

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 in Vienna, Austria, the first prize in the for microscopic images. She uses detailed pictures like this one to understand how the fly processes visual signals.