Colin, Coelho et al. set out to tackle this blind spot in ecology and cell biology by developing an automated imaging system. The system needed to image many kinds of protist cells in enough detail to see the features inside. The end-result was a 3D-imaging technique called e-HCFM — which is short for “environmental high content fluorescence microscopy”. Colin, Coelho et al. went on to use the technique on 72 samples collected on an expedition across the world’s oceans. This allowed them to automatically image, recognize and classify over 330,000 organisms.