This post is really just an update to the last one, on our recent paper on watching the growth of gut bacterial communities, but I thought I’d post separately that I just learned that we made the cover of mBio. (Or more accurately, the illustration I submitted is the “featured image” for this issue — journals that don’t exist in print don’t have covers!) Here’s the collage I created a few months ago, cutting, pasting, and false-coloring frames from our image data, along with the description:
Imaging can reveal the mechanisms underlying microbial colonization of the vertebrate gut. The figure is composed of twelve snapshots of bacteria in a larval zebrafish, derived from light sheet fluorescence microscopy images, taken at one-hour intervals and arranged clockwise in time. We can see an initial population of a few microbes, shown at the “12 o’clock” position, dividing into many thousands as time progresses. Their numbers, locations, and character as dense clusters or free individuals reveal the richness of the microbial community’s dynamics.
The image also appears in an exhibit on the “Art of Animal Microbes” at Cornell University, through January.
The Eighteenth Elephant 