Macrophages in a micro world

This micrograph was captured on a Leica TCS SP8 X confocal microscope equipped with a highly corrected 63X/1.4NA oil immersion lens in the NIAMS Light Imaging Section. The Z-stack acquisition modality was employed to capture multiple consecutive focal planes along the Z-axis. Individual focal planes were then recomposed to create a 3D visualization on Imaris 9.8 image analysis software. The resulting image depicts a macrophage, where the nucleus is shown in blue and the plasma membrane in red.