Monday, November 19, 2007

Human Protein Atlas







I can't pretend to understand what this is all about but I sure can appreciate the images. Nature as art. I've hugely sampled down these examples but the level of detail of the images on the site is awesome. As at this date there are 2,827,440 images. Link…

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A quick explanation: These are tissue samples that are stained for different proteins. In other words, you're looking at the a 'visual inventory' of the parts that run the human body.

For example, if a tissue contains two different cell types, you might want to be able to tell those cells apart somehow. In that case, you can stain for a protein that's only found in one of those cell types. This can even let you pick out precancerous cells before a visible tumor has formed, or see how cells 'decide' to become one kind of cell or another.

Stains like this show us the gorgeous complexity of these tissues.

tellurian said...

Thank you for taking the time to explain what we're looking at. Your example was great and made things very clear. Now I can appreciate these on another level.