More fluorescence

As I was saying... here are a few more AWESOME images demonstrating the use of fluorescence in biology. Yes, you can make a whole organism fluoresce!

Here we have fluorescent mice, fluorescent macaque monkeys, and, my favorite: a picture painted with different colors of fluorescent yeast.
The cool part about the yeast painting is that you first paint the picture with microscopic bits of yeast, then grow the culture in an incubator before you see the image you made.

And, I can't stress enough, this isn't just scientists playing around. This technology won the nobel prize a couple of years back by a team that isolated the fluorescent protein from jellyfish. The fluorescence is used as a "marker", not as in a crayola marker, but a marker as in a "signifier". For example, the monkeys shown were being used to study Huntington's disease, neurodegenerative disease. A protein associated with the disease was cloned into these monkeys along with the fluorescent protein and you can tell that they in fact are expressing the actual protein of interest because you can see that they also express the fluorescent protein marker. Pretty neat trick, huh?