The image shown throughout this website is a confocal image that I took of the sensory epithelium of the murine cochlea, and then edited to overlay a slightly altered version of the Golden Ratio spiral. There are many cell types present in the tissue, but the magenta color comes from a fluorescent reporter that is only expressed in a subset of neurons and glia. At the center of the spiral are the neuron cell bodies, and their processes extend radially outward towards the circumference of the spiral. The bright magenta dots that sit along these processes are the cell bodies of the glia that myelinate the axons.

While this spiral does not exactly follow the Golden Ratio that defines the Golden Spiral (read more about that here), it very closely resembles the same geometric pattern. To me, it’s the perfect symbol for using analytical approaches from engineering to address the toughest questions in biology.