We finished up the project today - we've been working on it for many months. That means, that we will write up what we've learned about sea urchins, microvilli ("hair" on sea urchins) and confocal microscopy. And a paper? Well, we found out that there was no novelty in our research and other people have done what we did years ago with a much higher precision. However, we've learned a lot and we have at least one chapter for our theses. And maybe the understanding and learning we gained is even more important then a publishing a paper (though that would have been nice as well).
What we thought, we had discovered, is deconvolution of an image. When you take an image with a confocal microscope, you don't obtain a sharp image due to a couple of factors (e.g. resolution limited by the light's wavelength) and attenuation by the sample. Thus, we wrote a simulation of this process and understood where light is attenuated and how we can describe this mathematically as well. However, the de-blurring of images usually happens via deconvolution and non-trivial algorithms which leads to very impressive results:
Left: Image as it could have been taken with a microscope; middle: deconvolved image; right: "original" image / sample
Thus, there are experts out there who can do this so much better then us! But we gained personal understanding which will be useful for any further microscope imaging :-)
