Michalina’s internship in Mulhouse

Michalina Krakowiak-Sołtysiak, a PhD student at the Adam Mickiewicz University Doctoral School of Natural Sciences, went on a week-long internship in Mulhouse (France).

The trip aimed to observe tardigrade eggs, also known as water bears, for the first time under the innovative TDM (tomographic diffractive microscope). The idea for the internship research arose thanks to the activities in the Early Career Researchers Boards of the EPICUR Alliance – the research in France was carried out at the invitation of Jean-Baptist Courbot, a former member of the ECRB. Physicists from the Institut de Recherche en Informatique, Mathématiques, Automatique et Signal (IRIMAS) at the Université de Haute-Alsace enabled a comparison of the method based on TDM, confocal and light microscopes. Michalina returned from France with a huge amount of data, photos and three-dimensional scans of tardigrade eggs of the Paramacrobiotus experimentalis and Paramacrobiotus gadabouti species. The UHA team also presented a 3D-printed model of a tardigrade!