A Skeleton of Glass
The radiating, kaleidoscopic pattern you see here was once the living glass skeleton – the cell wall – of a single-celled organism called a diatom. These organisms absorb silicon from their environment and transform it into silicon dioxide, the same substance glass is made of, to form their cell walls.
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DownloadA Skeleton of Glass
The radiating, kaleidoscopic pattern you see here was once the living glass skeleton – the cell wall – of a single-celled organism called a diatom. These organisms absorb silicon from their environment and transform it into silicon dioxide, the same substance glass is made of, to form their cell walls.
What am I looking at?
This is a magnified image of the structure of the cell wall of a diatom from marine sediment collected off the coast of Namibia. This is a depth-coded image, meaning the colors you see correspond to how close each portion of the image is to the viewer. Warm colors such as yellow and red are closer to the viewer (1), while cool colors such as blue and green are farther from the viewer (2).
Click on the right arrow to see other skeletal structures, as well as multiple diatoms stacked on top of one another.
Biology in the background
Diatoms are microscopic single-celled algae that live in fresh water, salt water, and/or damp soil all over the world. There are so many diatoms living in the oceans of the world that they constitute nearly half of the organic material in the oceans. They feed via the process of photosynthesis; a byproduct of this process is the release of oxygen into the water or atmosphere. In fact, diatoms are responsible for between 20% and 50% of the oxygen produced on the entire planet every year. They reproduce so quickly that, given sufficient nutrients and sunlight, a population of diatoms can double in size every 24 hours.
The dead bodies of diatoms fertilize the ocean floor and can even be carried by the wind from deserts that used to be bodies of water to fertilize entire regions on land. The Amazon basin in South America, for instance, is fertilized by 27 million tons of dead diatoms that are blown across the Atlantic Ocean from the Sahara Desert each year.
Diatoms can vary in size and shape a great deal, ranging from 2 micrometers across, or roughly 35 times smaller than the width of a human hair, to 200 micrometers across, or roughly three times larger than the width of a human hair.
Technique
These images were created using confocal microscopy.
Igor Siwanowicz, HHMI's Janelia Research Campus