Winner — Volume 9, Issue 9

Toxoplasma is a parasite that settles into the brain for life, sealed inside a tough little pod called a cyst.

I wanted to look inside one using expansion microscopy — a trick where you swell the whole sample in a water-absorbing gel until its tiniest structures are big enough for an ordinary microscope to see.

Nobody had published this on cysts, and I soon found out why: the cyst wall shrugs off the chemicals that make everything else expand. It took a while to crack, but it worked — and now any lab can do it, no super-resolution microscope required.

🟧 Cyst wall 🟦 DNA