The Butterfly Effect

As a butterfly flaps past, you might spot a glimmer of shimmering blue. That iridescent beauty is formed not of pigments or dyes, but by the physical shape of the wings. The secrets behind this colour creation can be seen by taking a (much, much) closer look. Pictured is a super-resolution image highlighting a protein called chitin in a developing butterfly forewing scale, visualised by researchers examining how another protein actin – also found in all human cells – forms a cytoskeleton that gives the wings their colour. The complex architecture of parallel ridges help this skeleton form the template for nanostructures that scatter light to create colouration. As it matures, pigments are deposited into the scale and it hardens, with cells retracting to leave a cytoskeleton coloured by both pigments and physical structures. Precise actin patterns are important for cellular structures in all animals, and studying at this super resolution could reveal hidden patterns of human health.

Image captured with Leica Microsystems microscopy

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Victoria J. Lloyd and colleagues
• Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, School of Biosciences and Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
• Image contributed by the authors under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence
• Research published in Nature Communications, May 2024