Philadelphia rolled out the red carpet (no, not literally) for the sixth annual ‘celldance’ awards at the American Society for Cell Biology 50th annual meeting yesterday. Several dozen conference goers crowded around the big screen at the ASCB booth as Greenfield “Kip” Sluder, outgoing head judge of the film and image contest presented first place winners with a movie poster and a cheque for US$500.
First place in the video category went to “Cellular Recognition” produced by U. Serdar Tulu of Duke University and shows a Drosophila melanogaster embryo in the process of dorsal closure, in which sheets of epidermal cells fuse together.
Source: ASCB
Tulu had won honourable mention for the award last year for a black and white video of the process. His boss, he says, urged him to send the colour version this year. See more movies from his lab here.
In the still image category, Li He, a Graduate student at Johns Hopkins University won first place for “Actomyosin and focal adhesion in the fly egg chamber” which shows actin filaments in red, focal adhesions in green and blue stained cell nuclei.
Source: ASCB
See his lab’s webpage for more images and video
Although it has generally attracted big crowds to watch the winning videos, celldance still only recieves a modest number of entries each year, says Sluder. Started in part as a way to attract submissions to the now largely abandoned ASCB image and video library, the number of submissions has grown slowly. The entries numbered in the 20s this year says Sluder, and combining related entries from the same lab meant that judges evaluated something on the order of 18 videos this year.
Other winners in the video category included Karl Lectreck at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester and Rosalind Silverman of the University of Toronto for showing cilia motion and drosophia embryos in development, respectively. In the stills category Graham Johnson at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla took second place for a creative take on the multi-drug resistance transporters seen here:
Source: ASCB