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Here at the ӳýMinded Blog, we polled the ӳý community for their best holiday-themed scientific imagery — and we got some wonderful responses. We'll be taking a break until the new year, but in the meantime, enjoy these gorgeous biological images sure to keep you in the holiday spirit. Check back each day for a new entry. See you in 2011!

Knowledge of an organism’s genome is a key tool for understanding its biology and a major route toward that knowledge is by sequencing its genome. In theory, this task is straightforward, but in practice it is extraordinarily sophisticated. For starters, genome sequencing requires a specialized laboratory machine to read DNA into a sequence of four different letters or bases. Yet that sequence does not flow out in one perfect, continuous string. It comes out in many small pieces (called “reads”), which require complicated computational methods to be assembled into one, coherent whole.

Here at the ӳýMinded Blog, we polled the ӳý community for their best holiday-themed scientific imagery — and we got some wonderful responses. We'll be taking a break until the new year, but in the meantime, enjoy these gorgeous biological images sure to keep you in the holiday spirit. Check back each day for a new entry. See you in 2011!

The image on the right, contributed by Rakesh Karmacharya, features a neuronal culture derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells. Neurons are in green, glial cells are in red and the blue stain shows cell nuclei.

Here at the ӳýMinded Blog, we polled the ӳý community for their best holiday-themed scientific imagery — and we got some wonderful responses. We'll be taking a break until the new year, but in the meantime, enjoy these gorgeous biological images sure to keep you in the holiday spirit. Check back each day for a new entry. See you in 2011!

This pair of images below displays neuronal dendrites, which resemble wintry, cracked ice on a frozen pond.