This month’s image, “Lightning flash, deep in the brain” was taken by Nan-hee Kim from the Quinn Group at JCSMR.

This image was captured using CAM’s ZEISS LSM800 Confocal with Airyscan and shows a hemisphere of the Drosophila 3rd instar larval brain.

Each neural lineage (set of neurons) contains cells generated from a single mother neural stem cell on the surface of the brain. The neurons project axon tracts into and interconnect in the centre of the brain, which forms a neural network.

In this image, the neural lineage and axon tract are shown in yellow and the brain cortex is shown in cyan. Violet indicates DNA in all of cells.