Featured image with Elena Nicolay

Our featured image, acquired by Elena Nicolay, shows double-transgenic zebrafish larvae in a Pop Art-style collage, with macrophages and neurons depicted in different colours (lookup tables, LUTs). The Z-stacks were acquired using a high-content spinning-disk microscope and the maximum-intensity projections of the fluorescence channels were merged with the middle slice of the transmitted-light stack.

Read more about Elena’s research.

Research career so far: I earned my bachelor’s degree in molecular biology and my master’s degree in regenerative biomedicine, which is how I became introduced to the transgenic zebrafish model.

Current research: I am currently a PhD student in the mTox group at the UFZ in Leipzig. My project focuses on developing a novel open-source workflow for imaging and analysis to investigate the effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals on the gut health of zebrafish larvae.

Favourite imaging technique/microscope: My dream microscope would be a light-sheet microscope combined with an automated imaging robot (AIR) to reduce the effort required for agarose embedding of zebrafish larvae, increase the throughput of experiments, and improve the quality of 3D reconstructions.

What are you most excited about in microscopy? Combining automated imaging solutions with automated analysis techniques is my passion. I’m excited to see what cool workflows and solutions will be developed and shared within the microscopy and image analysis community!