Beautiful Fly Guts?

Posted by Jeff on January 6, 2011
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Confocal snapshot of the junction between two portions of the Drosophila digestive tract: the midgut and the hindgut. Cell nuclei are labelled in blue, membranes in green and muscles in red. This image was taken by Irene Miguel-Aliaga. {Source.}

This is irresistible. In a paper published in the journal Cell Metabolism, biologists at the University of Cambridge use an imaging method to:

uncover a central role for the Drosophila intestine in the regulation of nutrient intake, fluid, and ion balance.


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Snapshots of different portions of the fly’s digestive tract and its nerve cells, taken using a confocal microscope

Isn’t this a lovely example of the beauty of nature, even if it is hidden in the digestive tract of a fruit fly?

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Comments

  1. #1 Claire Ainsworth
    January 8, 2011

    These pictures are stunning. I loved looking at them because I spent 4 years of my life studying the development of the fly renal tubules (which arise at the junction between the hindgut and midgut as in the first pic you posted). People used to back away from me slowly at parties when I started going on about how beautiful they were–wish I’d had pics like this to show them!