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One day last year, Gary Sarkis brought to work a bee’s leg. The leg was part of his daughter’s science project and Sarkis, who builds scientific microscopes at GE Healthcare Life Sciences, wanted to take a look with a brand new imaging machine developed by him and his colleagues. “My daughter and I observed the leg at home with her toy microscope,” Sarkis said. “We spent a lot of quality time together moving it around and getting it in focus. But when we were done, we had nothing more to take away than the memory of what the bee’s leg looked like.”
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A slice of the India rubber plant (Ficus elastica). Top image: A mosquito head.
The new machine, called Cytell, is a relatively inexpensive and intuitive imaging system that combines the microscope with the cell analyzer. It fits on a lab bench and allows researchers to quickly analyze and visualize routine samples, from insect limbs down to cells. “It’s similar to the point-and-shoot camera,” Sarkis says. “It helps take a lot of the microscopist out of getting the perfect shot. It wasn’t until Cytell that I felt I could spend 5 minutes on the microscope and get a great image that I could show my friends.”
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An image of lingual papillae, hair-like structures located on the top of the tongue.
When Sarkis looked at his daughter’s sample in his lab with Cytell, “an amazingly detailed hairy leg popped right up on my computer screen,” he says. For fun, he also imaged the leg in fluorescent light and saw that it was “very auto-flourescent,” and generated its own light.
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The colors added new details to the black and white hairy leg, and when Sarkis showed the photographs to his daughter, the response was predictable. “She wanted the machine for the home,” he says.
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The bee leg that started it all.
It’s clear that Sarkis himself also caught the Cytell bug. After the first leg, he imaged the rest of his daughter’s collection with the machine. After that, he acquired more school samples on Ebay, sold by parents whose kids had lost interest. “To me, these are hidden treasures which have led to some amazing images,” he says.
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The leg of a praying mantis.
To date, Sarkis has taken over 2,000 pictures with Cytell and assembled a “best of” list (a sampling illustrates this story). He even put them on several water bottles and on his walls. “My wife turned a pair into canvas portraits to hang in our house,” he says.
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A cross section of a pine needle.
Cytell, which is about a year old, builds on technology used by high-end instruments like the DeltaVision microscope and the IN Cell analyzer.
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A cross-section of bracken, a type of fern common in Ireland.
Sarkis says that Cytell is “essentially an automated hybrid of the microscope, the cell counter and the cytometer” (a device used for measuring cells). It has a tablet-like user interface powered by software that lets researchers quickly navigate its functions. “It allows them to simply set up very specific kinds of experiments and automatically receive data in the form of graphs, charts and reports to see if they worked,” he says. Even if they didn’t, they have pretty pictures to hang on their walls.
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The proboscis of a mosquito.
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A close-up of the Rhizopus fungus.
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The tip of an onion root.
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An ant’s head.
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An image of a corn stem.
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A mosquito larva.
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An image of the Pittosporum glabratum plant.
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A slice of the Tilia tree.
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A bee’s mouth.
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A mouse knuckle.
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One of Sarkis’ water bottles.
Images courtesy of Gary Sarkis and GE Healthcare Life Sciences