Hemocyte Confocal Microscopy

Today was a great day for confocal microscopy! After bleeding one of our squid I stained these cells with antibodies for immune genes that I'm interested in. I am trying to figure out if there are subpopulations of hemocytes or if all hemocytes are effectively the same.

Confocal microscopy is awesome because you can look at just one plane of view, which you can't do with a normal light or fluorescence microscope. The scope blocks out any out-of-focus light in your sample, allowing you to get very crisp images, like you see here:

 

It's also really cool because you can visually section a cell or tissue and then reconstruct a 3-D image like this

This work was made possible by all our experiment.com donors! Thanks for helping me characterize the circulating hemocyte population!