Nanostructure In Butterflies

 


Researchers have discovered a new method to see how butterflies develop their color.

Color is very important to butterflies for many reasons, including warding off predators and mate signaling.

Dr Annie Jessop is a post-doctoral fellow at Murdoch University School of Mathematics, Statistics,Chemistry and Physics. She led this exciting new research. 

Jessop reports that butterflies and many other insects use nanostructures  to create colors. It was previously thought that pigments were involved. She notes that there are certain mysteries concerning the nanostructures. 

The research was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. It is titled “Elucidating nanostructural organization and photonic properties of butterfly wing scales using hyper spectral microscopy.”

Dr. Jessop reports, “Butterflies and many other insects use nanostructures to generate color, a phenomenon known as structural color. While we have lots of knowledge about how color is produced from these structures, we have much less knowledge about how these structures develop in biological systems. Our study set out to develop a method that would allow scientists to measure the color that these structures produce through development. This would allow us to infer certain structural details at different time points, like the size of structures. Our research successfully demonstrated that the method proposed hyper spectral microscopy has the appropriate spatial, temporal and spectral resolution to do this and could reveal the development of optical nanostructures in living biological systems.”

Depending on it’s set up, hyper spectral microscopy is a technique that provides spectral data for each pixel of an image. It can record many hundreds of color channels. This is different than light microscopy, as it can only record in three color channels (red, blue and green). Multi spectral imaging can record in three to fifteen color channels. 

Dr. Jessop summarizes, “The microscope can measure the colors the structures produce over time, helping us to understand for the first time, how these tiny structures develop in living butterflies.”

 🦋 

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