Evident, a subsidiary of OIympus, unveiled the winner of its third Global Image of the Year Life Science Light Microscopy Award, an annual competition recognizing the best in life science imaging. The picture by the Czech winner, Jan Martinek, was selected from nearly 800 images submitted from 49 countries. Photo credit: Evident Olympus
Czech Republic, 24 May (BD) – Czech Jan Martinek has won the international Olympus Image of the Year Award light microscopy competition. He is a PhD student at the Department of Experimental Plant Biology, Faculty of Science, Charles University, and he succeeded with a picture of a field beetle flower.
Martinek won over the jury with a picture of the “Arabidopsis thaliana” flower with pollen tubes growing through the pistil. The flower tissues were chemically cleared to become transparent, while the pollen tubes were stained with aniline blue (yellow fluorescence) in order to be seen. The “Arabidopsis thaliana” is a small annual plant from the cruciferous family, used as a model organism in genetics, due to its simplicity and the short life of one generation. Martinek chose to create an image of this flower to highlight the beauty of science in plant cell research.
“Plants are fascinating and beautiful on all levels of magnification, from the level of ecosystems to the level of individual cells.” Martinek explained. “As a plant cell biologist, I spend hours looking at plants under the microscope. I see a lot of beautiful images, like this flower of Arabidopsis thaliana with pollen tubes growing through the pistil to fertilise the ovules. However, I capture hundreds of pictures like this just to measure the lengths of the pollen tubes, and readers of my research articles will see only some boxplots comparing the pollination efficiency of different mutants. I share these pictures on my social media for fellow scientists and the general public to enjoy the beauty of science, which sometimes stays hidden behind the statistically significant results. I am happy that thanks to the IOTY Award, my and others’ pictures of this fascinating microcosm get worldwide attention.”
The winner was awarded the grand prize, an Olympus SZX7 stereomicroscope with a DP28 digital camera.
Evident’s IOTY Award began in 2017 as the Image of the Year European Life Science Light Microscopy Award, with the aim of celebrating both the artistic and scientific value of microscopy images. Today, the competition is continuing this mission by encouraging the public to look at scientific images in a new way, appreciate their beauty, and share images with others. Entrants can submit up to three optical microscope images for the Olympus Image of the Year Award. The jury then evaluates the artistic and visual aspect of the work, its scientific impact and skill in working with a microscope.
