Lipid vesicles in 3D (3rd of September 2012.)
My friend >> Primož Ziherl is an expert for vesicles. In addition to that, and to all that Primož does and is, he also likes my graphics. It is no wonder thus that we collaborate for the second time on the cover page for his paper. This time, like >> the time before, the journal in question is Soft Matter. The cover page of the journal is shown above (7th of September, 2012), and below is the image I proposed. One sees that there are differences, especially regarding the green color :( Soft Matter designers have also additionally emphasized the background which is made of a large number of vesicles, but they are almost invisible in my version, just as I wanted them to be.
The image I made this time is somewhat similar to the one I made 4 years ago, which is not unexpected since the objects of interest are the same (vesicles). This time, >> the paper Three-dimensional analysis of lipid vesicle transformations, is mostly of experimental nature, and Primož's coauthors are Japanese scientists (Ai Sakashita, Naohito Urakami and Masayuki Imai) from Ochanomizu and Yamaguchi universities (Tokyo and Yamaguchi). In the paper, they show the application of a fast and high-quality confocal microscopy for monitoring the spontaneous transformation of the vesicle shapes. In the image above, the experimental data is shown in the green "box".
I constructed the 3D information from the sequence of 2D experimental confocal cross-sections, which I processed as is shown in the image above. These are PNG files with alpha channel (transparency; gray parts of images), which enabled a special look of the vesicle (two of them in fact) in the box - it looks as being immersed in some red-light-scattering medium.
In addition to the experimental vesicle, its numerical, theoretical reconstruction is also shown, as can be seen in the
detail of the cover page in the image above. The challenge here was to position a "theoretical" and "experimental" vesicle in
3D space so that the correspondence between them is obvious.
Theoretical vesicles reconstructed from the experimental data are mesh objects, as is shown in one of the early
variants of the cover page (below).
For some time, I am working with Primož on an interesting problem in elasticity so I hope to soon show some nice
images from that project.
UPDATE: (21.12.2012) A simplified variant of the Soft Matter cover page was also published in the
magazine of the Jožef Stefan Institute, Novice 162 (2012) (the image below).
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Last updated on 3rd of September 2012.