No Man’s Gland - Emilia Pulver wins NKI image contest

Skin tissue was not exactly what she was looking for through her microscope. PhD Emilia Pulver studies the ducts of male mammary glands and the early development of cancer in them. But when she saw this piece of skin, she was fascinated.

“It made me think of a dark, mystical force that lures the viewer into this eerie, enchanted forest”, Emilia says. She is from Boston, US, and joined the Jos Jonkers group because of their excellent reputation in animal modelling for cancer research.

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Coolest images

“There is not a lot of attention on the fact that men can get breast cancer too. We investigate the development of cancer in male mice, and the role of hormones, for example, on malignant duct transformation. It gives us new insights into male mammary gland biology and mechanisms of cancer progression that may translate to a broader range of breast cancers in the clinic.”

“When I looked at one of the tissue samples for my research, I noticed a big piece of skin that was still on top of the mammary gland. It looked pretty cool, this 3D landscape with all that depth. To be honest, all of my coolest images are from other structures than the ducts I study, although ducts are beautiful too.”

The evolution of cancer

Runner-up Karen van der Sluis named her winning image Cancerous confetti. She is a PhD student at the departments of surgery and pathology and took the image in the context of a study into the effect of the tumor microenvironment on the development of esophageal cancer.  “To get more insight into the evolution of these tumors, we investigated the genome of the tumor prior and after treatment and at the moment of recurrence. Additionally, we studied the tumor microenvironment to determine whether this affects which cells survive. We analyzed this by staining immune cells and tumor cells with immunofluorescence, which resulted in beautiful pictures.”  

100 different proteins

Third place goes to Cellular kaleidoscope made by research technician Iris Seignette from the department of Pathology, supervised by Erik Hooijberg and Gerrit Meijer. “A malignant tumor not only consists of cancer cells, but also many other cells such as structural cells and cells of the immune system”, says Iris, who supports and trains researchers in image analysis. “It is of great importance to research how all these cells behave and communicate with each other. Under the microscope, we can visualize this thanks to artificial colors added to proteins in the tissues. Until recently, we could visualize six to eight proteins at a time, but with the new CODEX technology we can stain up to 100 different proteins in a single tissue slice of around 3 microns thin. This technology offers so much more context.”