3-DIMENSIONAL RECONSTRUCTION OF PARAMECIUM-PRIMAURELIA ORAL-APPARATUS THROUGH CONFOCAL LASER SCANNING OPTICAL MICROSCOPY

The oral apparatus of the ciliate protozoan Paramecium primaurelia, a single-celled eukaryotic organism, is a highly organized structure whose arrangement is of important taxonomic, phylogenetic and developmental significance. This paper analyses oral structures by means of a confocal laser scanning optical microscope (CLSM), which allows their three-dimensional visualization and measurement. The extraction of the intrinsic three-dimensional information related to the biological objects under investigation can in turn be related to their functional state, according to the classical paradigms of structure to function relationship identification. In our experiments, we acquired different data sets. These are optical slices of the biological sample under investigation, acquired in a confocal situation, through epi-illumination, in reflection. For comparison with conventional microscopy, two-dimensional images were acquired via a standard TV camera coupled to the microscope itself. The volumes obtained by piling up the slices were rendered through different techniques, some of them directly implemented on the workstation controlling the CLSM system, some of them on a SUN SPARCstation 1, where the original data were transferred via an Ethernet link. In this last instance, original software has been developed for the visualization and animation of the three-dimensional structures, under UNIX and X-Window, according to a ray-tracing algorithm.