Jan Martinek is a plant cell biologist from the Charles University of Prague, at the Charles University of Prague, who has just won the Olympus award for the Imatge de l’Any 2021 with this microphotography of plant structures.
Anatomy of a flower. This is an Arabidopsis thaliana flower with pollen tubes growing through the pistil. Here, the flower tissues are chemically cleared, so they become transparent and the pollen tubes, stained with aniline blue (yellow fluorescence) can be seen. The sample was imaged using widefield fluorescence microscopy with UV excitation light.
At the Department of Experimental Plant Biology, he focuses on the study of the actin cytoskeleton and its role in plant cell growth and morphogenesis.
He mainly works with different types of microscopes, so he gets a lot of nice pictures as a byproduct of his work, which he enjoys sharing with others to promote plant biology and science in general.
