Myoanatomy of the velvet worm leg revealed by laboratory-based nanofocus X-ray source tomography

At Technical University of Munich, a table-top NanoCT system based on Excillum’s NanoTube has shown its capability of achieving ~100 nm resolution using standard image processing routine and without X-ray optics. In this paper, its potential in biological research has been demonstrated with the high-resolution nanoCT data of the tiny leg of a velvet worm, which revealed the surface morphological structure of the limb with the imaging quality similar to scanning electron microscopy, and simultaneously, the internal muscular structure with the resolution higher than confocal laser scanning microscopy.