Biology Students Spend Valentine's
Day with a Broken Heart

February 2000  -  On Valentine's Day, students in Robert Blystone's microanatomy lab will be looking at the dissected tissue of a damaged heart.  But it won't be through a traditional microscope.  They'll be using a virtual microscope on a computer. Blystone, professor of biology, has sewn together 150 digital images of heart tissue with three different stages of cell death.  This allows students to have a panoramic view of the tissue, zoom into a specific area, or look at all the different pieces and see a pattern. "Students can look at the forest and then look at the bark on a tree--going back and forth with relative ease," says Blystone, who has used digitized images from electron microscopes in his lab for ten years.  "What's more important?  Looking at something or understanding what it does?  I'd rather have computers than microscopes in my lab." To find out more about Blystone's use of virtual microscopes, contact Carolyn Wheat at (210) 999-8406 or by e-mail at cwheat@trinity.edu.

Back to the Tip Sheets Page Back to the What's New Page Back to the Trinity Home Page

Last updated on June 7, 2000 by the Office of Public Relations