This astounding photo of a heart-shaped cell entangled in a blood clot has won the British Hearth Foundation’s 2017 photo contest.
In the image, which was captured through an electron microscope, red blood cells are trapped in the 3D mesh of fibrin fibres, which hold the clot together.
The cell had remarkably been compressed into a heart shape by the contracting fibres surrounding it.
Taken by Fraser Macrae, a BHF-funded researcher at the University of Leeds, this image shows a heart-shaped cell entangled in a blood clot held together by a mesh of fibrin fibres. This astounding photo was taken at 5,000-times magnification
These fibrin fibres have the ability to stretch without breaking to more than five times their original size.
The image was snapped by a University of Leeds researcher who is studying how clots form.
‘I was amazed when I saw the blood cell which by chance had been squeezed into a heart shape’, said the overall winner, Fraser Macrae.
‘As someone who is investigating aspects of heart disease, it seemed to be very symbolic.
‘By understanding the difference between deadly clots in patients with cardiovascular disease and clots which help us when we’ve been injured, we hope to design new drugs that remove damaging clots or prevent their formation, ultimately saving lives.’
This photo taken by Dr Sean Davidson shows a thin section of a mouse heart with a cross-section of blood vessels that look rather like a heart itself. The heart muscle and vessel walls appear red, while the nucleus – the control centre of the cell – appears blue
The inside of an artery, captured by Dr Matthew Lee, a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde. ‘This image tells a story of how science and art can come together to help advance our knowledge of modern medicine’, said competition judge Christopher Jackson
It is the second time the researcher has won the competition, after an image he took in 2015 of the clotting process impressed the judges.
Other shortlisted entries included an image of the blood vessel network inside a zebrafish heart and the immune system at work inside a muscle.
‘This image tells a story of how science and art can come together to help advance our knowledge of modern medicine’, said competition judge Christopher Jackson.
‘At the same time, images like this give us the opportunity to appreciate the incredible beauty in something that is invisible to the human eye.’
This image, captured by Dr Tamara Gibri, shows the immune system at work in a muscle. An injury, caused by infection or tissue damage, has caused white blood cells called neutrophils (pink) – that are normally found in the blood – to breach blood vessel walls (blue and green) and invade the surrounding tissue
This image shows the densely packed and organised blood vessel network in the heart of an adult zebrafish. It was captured by Dr Yujie Yang from the University of Edinburgh
The image, captured by Dr Marcela Rosas from Cardiff University, shows a fibroblast in culture that has been labelled with an antibody. Each year in the UK about 100,000 people die from a heart attack or stroke caused by unwanted blood clots, according to the British Heart Foundation
A photo taken by Dr Sean Davidson shows a thin section of a mouse heart with a cross-section of blood vessels that look rather like a heart itself.
The heart muscle and vessel walls appear red, while the nucleus – the control centre of the cell – appears blue.
Another image taken by Dr Simon Wilson from the University of Edinburgh shows a blood clot forming in a healthy human blood vessel.
Each year in the UK about 100,000 people die from a heart attack or stroke caused by unwanted blood clots, according to the British Heart Foundation.
This image, taken by Dr Simon Wilson at the University of Edinburgh, shows a blood clot forming in a healthy human blood vessel. Platelets (green) make up the bulk of the clot with fibrin (red) sticking it to the blood vessel wall
A mirrored image of mitochondria labelled with a fluorescent protein in a living mouse embryo forms in the shape of a butterfly. The image was captured by Dr Nicoletta Surdo at the University of Oxford
This image shows the muscle fibres (cardiac myocytes) that form the chambers of the heart in a mouse under a microscope. The cells are coloured by using fluorescent dyes that picks out titin (in green), a giant protein that acts as a molecular spring, and beta-actinin (in red), which helps to assemble and maintain myofibrils. These are the cells which enable the heart muscle to contract. The image was captured by Dr Nicoletta Surdo from the University of Oxford