Paramecium and Other Ciliates: Richard Allen's Image Collection

The purpose of this website is to make available to anyone interested in ciliated protozoa a collection of images of several of these single celled organisms that the author and his collaborators have accumulated over the past 42 years, 1964 to 2006. Most of these images are transmission electron micrographs of thin-sectioned cells with a sprinkling of fluorescent light micrographs of whole cells mixed in to illustrate specific points. The first images were taken when the author was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Keith R. Porter at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. At that time under Dr. Porter's encouragement I had begun to work on an atlas of electron micrographs to complement his atlas on vertebrate cells and tissues with Dr. Mary A. Bonneville and on plant cells with Dr. Myron C. Ledbetter. Thus I undertook to collect several representative ciliates from biological supply houses in the U.S. and later from the Cambridge culture collection in the U.K. as well as from a collection in France. This ambitious undertaking was begun in spite of the fact that I had never had a course in protozoology and had only recently been introduced to my first ciliate, Tetrahymena pyriformis (later renamed T. thermophila). My research assignment for which I was to utilize Tetrahymena was to develop a specific stain for microtubules which turned out not to be possible until the advent of antibodies. To acquaint myself with this cell I fixed the cell using the newly developed glutaraldehyde fixation methods, embedded the cell in an epoxy resin, Epon 812, and sectioned the cell with a newly acquired diamond knife using a Porter-Blum microtome, that had been developed by my mentor, Professor Porter. Though the atlas never saw the light of day, my 40 year career of doing research on ciliated protozoa was successfully launched (for CV of papers published by the author, see this page).

As I now come to the close of my career I had to decide what to do with the numerous electron micrographs accumulated over this 40 year period. Rather then discarding all of these images, I chose to make use of the technological advancements in other areas during these 40 years which now make it possible for anyone in the world with access to the internet to be able to view these images. Therefore I selected the best images, prepared figure captions for the images and am herewith making them available to the curious. Included are over 550 images divided into 19 chapters by genus name of the ciliate or, in the case of Paramecium multimicronucleatum, the chapters are divided into topics.

In this project I have had the unfailing assistance of Marilynn Aihara who digitized and prepared the images for presentation either from the original negative or, more often, from the electron micrograph print. The internet server is administered by the Pacific Biosciences Research Center of the University of Hawaii under the very able direction of Dr. Bradley R. Jones who is assisted by Tina Carvalho, who also provides technical assistance to users of electron and confocal microscopes in the Biological EM Facility at the University of Hawaii.

Many of these images have been published in different, and usually cropped, formats in papers published in scientific journals by the author and his collaborators. Since these journals hold the copyrights for these smaller images, as a courtesy to the author these images should not be reproduced commercially without notifying and obtaining the consent of the author who will inform the requestor if there is a copyright involved and who owns it. For use by teachers or students in educational environments permission to use these images is not necessary and their use is encouraged. Research workers are also encouraged to draw on these images as a resource in their work.

As many of these images were acquired in the process of doing research mostly funded by the National Science Foundation, USA, and to a lesser extent by the National Institutes of Health, USA, we wish to acknowledge their support for the author's research. NSF grants: PCM 78-15893, PCM 81-10802, PCM 82-01700, PCM 82-12316, PCM 84-02881, PCM 84-00418, DCB 85-02212, BBS 87-21751, DCB 87-18598, DCB 88-19182, DIR 88-20761,DCB 90-17455, MCB 92-06097, MCB 95-05910, MCB 98-09929, MCB 01-36362, NIH grants: GM-17991, GM-27283. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Finally I am indebted to a number of collaborators, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students who have worked in the Membrane Biology Laboratory over the years. This list includes:

Provided by Dr. Richard D. Allen on July 1, 2006.