Fanny Fanny Eggeler, a PhD student in Filippo Del Bene's team, discovered neuroscience during her master's degree. She has always been interested in the complexity of the human physiology, and was captivated by the atmosphere of constant discovery that is characteristic of the research environment.

Her team is currently working on the functioning of the visual system in vertebrates, using the visual system of the zebrafish as a model. Fanny's thesis focuses on this subject, and more precisely on a specific protein family, Meteorin, which was recently discovered and which seems to play a role in the development and maintenance of neuronal cells.

The 'fish are cool' image shows a vibratome section of a genetically modified zebrafish head at 5-days postfertilisation. This is one of the first images Fanny took when she joined the team. It was taken with an inverted confocal microscope, a machine that allows precise and detailed images of large samples. With these images we can easily determine the morphology and distribution of the molecules of the object of study.

Portrait and text by Delphine Menard