Not quite a cure for cancer

Sometimes science experiments don't quite go as planned, for a variety of reasons. In the case of these two pictures, tools that I thought worked well turned out to not work as advertised and I didn't find out until later. Although the tools didn't work as intended, they still resulted in some pretty pictures that will never see the light of day in an actual science journal since they have no useful information to convey to other researchers, so instead I share them with you here.

The first picture (above - click image for a much larger version) shows a small portion of the dissected brain from an adult Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly). The red color comes from a fluorescent tag attached to an antibody that binds to the protein rhodopsin, which the fly eye uses as part of its vision system. The green color comes from a different fluorescent protein fused to an antibody that I thought recognized the protein I have been studying. Long story short, we have no clue what this antibody actually does bind to, but we do now know with certainty that it doesn't recognize my protein of interest!

This image (again click image for a much larger version) shows part of the adult fruit fly gut, where a specialized sack called der rectaldrusen (roughly translating to "rectal papillae") attaches which the fly uses to reabsorb salts and other essential nutrients prior to expelling waste. The green color here comes from a protein called Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), which we thought was being expressed in tissues where my protein of interest normally expresses. In the case of this image, the GFP protein was always turned on in this tissue regardless of what protein's expression pattern we were attempting to study. Luckily this sort of problem is easy to deal with and we just found a different fly line that didn't have this problem and continued our research with that, instead.