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Life

Shimmering colour in a fruit fly's eye

By Abigail Beall

17 January 2014

Âé¶¹´«Ã½. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

(Image: IMP)

This award-winning photo invites you to look deep into the eyes of the fruit fly.

The magnified image shows some of the hundreds of the structures called ommatidia that make up the compound eye of Drosophila melanogaster. Cell nuclei are stained blue, proteins called cadherin are red and a glycoprotein called chaoptin, found in the photoreceptors, is green.

The image won Karin Panser, a neuroscientist from the in Vienna, Austria, the first prize in the for microscopic images. She uses detailed pictures like this one to understand how the fly processes visual signals.

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