BIRDS OF PARADISE: This photo shows normal hairs on the surface of a fuzzy-leafed weed called Arabidopsis, a popular genetic system for plant studies because of its small genome, small plant size and short life cycle. Plant biology professor Deborah Delmer hopes to use a mutant of this plant to detail how the world's most abundant compound, cellulose, is synthesized in plants. Under a light microscope, using light separated into its spectral colors and then polarized, Delmer's group screens thousands of these little seedlings for mutants without cellulose. Highly ordered fibrils of cellulose show up as blue polarized light in one plane and yellow polarized light in another.