Press Release

The cell that isn’t New technique captures division of membrane-less cells

Heidelberg, 17 January 2013 – This may look like yet another video of a dividing cell, but there’s a catch. You are looking at chromosomes (red) being pulled apart by the mitotic spindle (green), but it’s not a cell, because there’s no cell membrane. Like a child sucking an egg out of its shell, Ivo Telley from the European Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, removed these cellular ‘innards’ from a fruit fly embryo, at a stage when it is essentially a sac full of membrane-less ‘cells’ that divide and divide without building physical barriers to separate themselves from each other. “It’s the first time we can study ongoing cell division without the cell membrane, and that means we can physically manipulate things,” says Telley, “so we can uncover the physical forces involved, and see what are the constraints.” New technique captures division of membrane-less cells - red: chromosomes, green: spindles - The new technique is described in detail today in Nature The full video is available on the EMBL website Protocols, and has already led Telley and colleagues to a Credit: Ivo Telley/EMBL surprising discovery. They found that, although successive divisions fill the embryo with more and more material, leaving less and less space for each spindle, and spindles become new technique will help to unravel this and other mysteries of smaller as the embryo develops, simply squeezing the ‘cell’ into how a cell becomes two. tighter quarters doesn’t make it produce a smaller spindle. The work, which started in Thomas Surrey’s lab at EMBL, was Combined with the genetic manipulation approaches carried out by Telley and Imre Gáspár in Anne Ephrussi’s lab at commonly used in fruit fly studies, the scientists believe their EMBL. Surrey is now at Cancer Research UK.

Source Article A single embryo extract for the study of mitosis ex vivo. Telley, I.A., Gáspár, I., Ephrussi, A. & Surrey, T. - Nature Protocols, Advanced online publication on 17 January 2013 - DOI: 10.1038/nprot.2013.003

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