Image Competition 2011
2011 Image Competition Winners Heading link
Many people voted for the best image in the 1st Annual Images of Research Competition! Congratulations to our winners, whose images are featured below.
View All Original 2011 Images
This image was taken while examining the expression profile of a 56kD protein under different conditions by western blot analysis. This photo was captured with a Canon DSLR (1/4000s @ f/1.2 ISO 100, FL 85mm).
| Dept. of Biopharmaceutical Sciences
The sun rising-like image on the photograph is isolated E.coli colonies grown on an agar plate after being transformed with red fluorescence protein (RFP) plasmid. The research is focused on designing hydrogel microparticles as polynucleic acid delivery system. We choose RFP plasmid as a model polynucleic acid to evaluate the transfection efficiency of hydrogel microparticles. The picture was taken under LED light bulbs in a UIC College of Pharmacy research laboratory. This creation was equally contributed by My Nguyen (undergraduate research assistant, Biology) and Misuk Bae (graduate student, Biopharmaceutical Sciences). RFP plasmid is a generous gift from Professor William Beck.
| Dept. of Biopharmaeutical Sciences
The focus of my research is to study the enzymes that are important in the metabolic pathways of pathogenic bacteria. Insight into the structure and function of such important proteins forms the basis for developing new drugs. Hence the title “Crystals – unraveling the secrets of Life” was chosen. Structural characterization of proteins is performed by X-ray crystallography, wherein the most difficult step is to obtain adequate quality crystals. Crystals of a phosphatase from Mycobacterium tuberculosis are captured here. These crystals were grown following standard crystallization technique (hanging drop vapor diffusion) and images captured on a microscope.
| Dept. of Medicinal Chemistry & Pharmacognosy