Emma Garland Winner of the Hans Schuppe Prize 2019

Congratulations to Emma Garland for winning the Hans Schuppe imaging prize 2019!

We were extremely fortunate to receive a very large number of excellent entries this year, with subjects ranging from wildlife to the environment and the microscopic, and the competition was fierce.

The judges had this to say about Emma's entry:

"Not only has Emma perfectly framed and captured the natural aesthetic beauty of the microscopic biological world as seen through a confocal microscope, but she has demonstrated a high level of technical ability to achieve such wonderful specimen staining and preservation".

Emma told us: "My image was taken on a confocal microscope as part of my undergraduate dissertation at Bournemouth University. Depicted in these images are Drosophila melanogaster nephrocytes surrounding the heart tube (not seen here). Nephrocytes are filtration cells (sort of like the flies kidneys) that filter the haemolymph and endocytose any toxic molecules. These cells are analogous to human podocyte cells, which are implicated in kidney disease. The organism these belong to have had the protein Tau knocked down to assess whether this would have had an impact on the nephrocytes. They have been stained with GFP (shows whole cell), ToPro (stains nuclei) and WGA (stains the membrane) to show the structure of these cells".

The Hans Schuppe Image Prize was established in the memory of Dr Hans Schuppe who was the founder of the SoBS' Imaging Facility and head of Imaging until 2013. He was a deeply popular member of staff and committed to teaching and furthering imaging at UoS. The prize is an annual event, open to every undergraduate and postgraduate within the School of Biological Sciences. Any image related to biology, in the widest possible sense, can be submitted ranging from microscope images to photographs of wildlife and the environment.