Photo Credit: Jennifer Peters, Ph.D., and Michael Taylor, Ph.D. at the Cell and Tissue Imaging Center at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
This may look like a tangle of holiday lights, but it’s actually a peek inside the developing brain of a live zebrafish. NIH-supported researchers created this award-winning picture by labeling the brain’s endothelial cells with fluorescent proteins and then using a confocal microscope to snap 3-D images as the cells assembled into the blood-brain barrier. So why are these guys taking photos of fish brains? They want to gain a better understanding of how the blood-brain barrier develops. And that’s important because a major hurdle in the treatment of many brain disorders is figuring out better ways to move drugs and other therapies from the bloodstream and into the brain.
Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., was officially sworn in on Monday, August 17, 2009 as the 16th director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Collins was nominated by President Barack Obama on July 8, and was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate on August 7.