Friend of Webvision, Peter Westenskow in Marty Friedlander’s laboratory sent along this gorgeous image of retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells differentiating from induced pluripotent stem cells. After growing into a sheet, Peter fixed and Vibratome sectioned these cells followed by immunostaining with Beta catenin (red) and DAPI (blue) before 3D reconstruction using ZEN software. The interesting thing is that Peter has a protocol for making RPE cells in culture resemble mature, adult RPE cells which is quite a feat. I’d love to find out just how similar they are to the real McCoy.
Peter as a post-doc is already one of the most accomplished scientists I know in RPE cell biology. Peter was heavily recruited by a number of labs for his current post-doc after leaving the Fuhrmann laboratory and we were sorry to see him leave the Moran Eye Center. I’d also like to note that Peter helped me in a previous project by rapidly working through an early investigation on the feasibility of a particular study after the first person assigned to the project did not complete the work. This conclusion enabled the very difficult decision to ironically *not* apply for a grant based on an incorrect line of reasoning and saved me potentially huge amounts of effort and time, something I am grateful for. Next round is on me Peter…