#pseudoprorodon

"Here's another ciliate called a pseudoprorodon that James looked at through all of these objectives. At first it just looks like a little green thing floating around and knocking into stuff. As we go up in magnification, we can start to make out the subtle undulations of its body, which shifts the different shades of green. As we look even closer, the green itself takes on a new life, revealing the perimeters of the individual algae inside the pseudoprorodon."

Journey to the Microcosmos- We Upgraded Our Microscope... Again!

Images Originally Captured by Jam's Germs

"The power of fluorescence microscopy is not just finding fluorescent structures that exist in nature. Chemist and biologists have developed all sorts of ingenious techniques to highlight different parts of cells using fluorescent dyes and proteins. James is working on building up his arsenal of fluorescence microscopy tools and techniques so that soon, we'll be able to dive even sinto the microcosmos to seek out things that have been hidden from us before, uncovering the unseen world inside the unseen world that surrounds us."

Journey to the Microcosmos- We Upgraded Our Microscope... Again!

Images Originally Captured by Jam's Germs

CC: "In this footage, we're looking at the Pseudoprorodon that we saw earlier, only this time it's being hit with 385 nanometer light. The red we see is the fluorescence from natural structures, this is called autofluorescence. The rest of the organism is dark because it did not respond to that 385 nanometer light, making the color all the more vibrant."

Journey to the Microcosmos- We Upgraded Our Microscope... Again!

Images Originally Captured by Jam's Germs

"Revealing those details inside the tetrahymena and pseudoprorodon comes at a cost. We can't see as much of the world around them, whether that's the emptiness around the rotifer exoskeleton or the objects that the pseudoprorodon keeps bumping into. Whether or not you need those details depends on what you're trying to learn or what we are trying to show, and that's why having the flexibility to look through a wider range of objectives is such an exciting upgrade for us. Objectives are our gateways to the microcosmos, and we're excited to have all of these new scales to look at."

Journey to the Microcosmos- We Upgraded Our Microscope... Again!

"We're nearing the end of our fourth season of Journey to the Microcosmos, and over that time, we've been able to see microbes through all kinds of lenses--literally--thanks to James, our microscopes. For the rest of us on the Microcosmos team, it's been really cool to not only see the footage that James has recorded, but also see the journey that he has been on with the microscopes themselves... We've all been on this journey together, so let's look back on where it's taken us, and also get a peek at where we're going in the future."

Journey to the Microcosmos- We Upgraded Our Microscope... Again!