Where do you suppose this photo was taken?
A. It's a false-color representation of the surface of a meteorite.
B. It's a 100x enlargement of the surface of a shark tooth.
C. It's crystals of an anti-cancer drug.
D. It's the "teeth" on a butterfly wing.
Answer below the fold. . .
The answer is (C). This is a 10x polarized light image of mitomycin, taken by Margaret Oeschli at the Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky. It won 7th place in the 2008 Nikon Small World Competition.
Mitomycin structure (from Wikipedia)
Mitomycin C (also called mutamycin) is an antitumor antibiotic which crosslinks DNA with high specificity at the sequence CpG. A single crosslink per genome is sufficient to kill a bacterial cell. The sequence CpG is not as common in mammalian DNA, but Mitomycin is still effective against stomach, pancreatic, bladder, colorectal, and other types of cancer. It's usually administered intravenously, but also comes in eye drops for use in the treatment of pterygium (a cool word for a not-so-cool condition: overgrowth of the conjunctiva of the eye).
Related:
I got this one right (even if I can't find the midpoint of a line.)
Hey Jess -- in honor of all the good brain food you post, I am passing along to you the "I Love Your Blog Award". You definietly deserve it.
Years ago Aalbert Heine in the Journal of Irreproducible Results had an article suggesting that photos like this could save research funds by being used to illustrate multiple scientific papers. The article had 4 identical photos showing in turn a eutectic mixture of quartz and plagioclase, a fragment of a hickory ax handle, skin of Peripatus and the surface of a root hair.