• Question: What is the best thing you have ever looked at under a microscope and why?

    Asked by to Bethany, Hannah, Keith, Peter, Ramya on 18 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Peter Elliott

      Peter Elliott answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      I think the best thing I ever saw was whilst I was teaching undergraduate students how to use light microscopes during a practical. We were looking at multi-celluar organisms, in particular something called Volvox. Despite looking like one cell, it is actually a group of cells that form colonies in a ball like shape. I think their green colour (from the chlorophyll that they use to make sugars) was so intense and beautiful that I had to take moment to appreciate this amazing organism. We we able to observe the tails on the cells beating away which even the lecturer could not observe under their microscope so that was a great bonus.
      The link below is to wikipedia, not the most scientifically accurate place of times but the pictures do capture what I was describing very well.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvox

    • Photo: Hannah Tanner

      Hannah Tanner answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      I love looking at fungi under the microscope as some of them are very beautiful (google for images of something like aspergillus to see what I mean).

      I also like seeing something like Trichomonas vaginalis under the microscope. It’s a tiny parasite that causes genital infection but if you see a live one under the microscope they look like little bright triangles whizzing around in a drop of liquid.

    • Photo: Bethany Dearlove

      Bethany Dearlove answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      I haven’t used a microscope since school, so the Volvox and aspergillus sound very exciting to look at to me! I remember looking at onion epidermis (the thin membrane found between the layers of the onion) under the microscope during my A levels though. I think it was one of the first microscope slides I made myself that showed the cells really clearly.

    • Photo: Ramya Bhatia

      Ramya Bhatia answered on 22 Jun 2014:

      The first thing i saw under a microscope were my cheek cells. I cannot forget how cool they were. These days i do a lot of something called fluorescen microscopy where we artifically make differnt proteins in the cell to glow in different colours and you get beautiful colourful images of our cells. If oyu go into my profile i have one such image.

      Something else i really like doing is called timelapse microscopy which i did a few years back during my masters. We put a dish with cells under a microscope for 24 hours focussing in a particular place and recorded it. Then when you look at it in fast forward motion you can see the cells dividing and moving around. It is very fascinating

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