Spin Me Round

Take a closer look at something and you’re bound to spot details that you hadn’t noticed before. The same is true for scientists using ever more powerful microscopy techniques to peer inside cells like this fat precursor cell from a mouse. Using a new three-dimensional technique known as holo-tomographic microscopy, researchers are spying on structures inside living cells in unprecedented detail. Importantly, the method doesn’t need any special chemical dyes and works with very low levels of light so as not to damage delicate cells or affect their behaviour – and that behaviour turns out to include some pretty weird things. One of the strangest is that the cell’s nucleus (the structure that houses all the DNA) seems to spin around before it divides, turning up to two full rotations over a couple of hours. Why? Nobody knows, so researchers will have to watch even more closely to find the reason.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image by Hugo Moreno and Dr. Mathieu Frechin
• Nanolive SA, EPFL Innovation Park, Ecublens, Switzerland
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Research published in PLOS Biology, December 2019