Developmental Dance

The swirling, rotating rainbow of dots in this video is a 3D reconstruction of cell movements in a developing fruit fly embryo. Each dot represents a single cell nucleus, and the dots’ tails represent the last five minutes of the cells’ trajectories. Advances in microscopy have enabled the recording of such embryonic cell movements for some time, but gathering meaningful information from the associated terabytes of image data has been stymied by a lack of computing power – until now. Computational scientists have devised complex algorithms that allow the rapid, accurate and simultaneous tracking of many thousands of cells – their divisions and movements – over many hours of development. And not just in flies – they’ve also tracked cells in developing fish and mouse embryos. This technology should reveal not only how cells move in normal tissue and organ development, but also how erroneous movements lead to developmental defects.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

Writer

Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

Website

• Video by Philipp J. Keller and colleagues
• Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA
• Copyright held by Nature Publishing Group
• Research published in Nature Methods, August 2014