Peter Eaton, from the NanoBio research group at UCIBIO, won the second prize in the Royal Microscopical Society Scientific Imaging Competition in “Electron Microscopy - Physical Sciences”.
Peter Eaton named his beautiful image “Field of Petals”, explaining that “these crystals are part of a project seeking to develop new antimalarial compounds” and that “the sample was provided by Carolina Tempera, of the Instituto de Medicina Molecular, Lisbon”. Peter explains that the "Scanning Electron Microscopy image of hemozoin-like crystals secondary electron image was measured at 15 kV” and that the “image represents a magnification of ca. 5000x, the horizontal field width is 55 microns”.
Peter collaborates, on this project, with Ricardo Franco, from Bionano Lab at UCIBIO, as well as with Thomas Hänscheid and Miguel Prudêncio research groups at Instituto de Medicina Molecular. The project concerns a novel way to grow hemozoin-like crystals in such a way that this growth could be used as an assay to screen for hemozoin inhibiting antimalarial drugs.