I'm not joking!
If you want to see what I mean, check out these truly beautiful time-lapse movies of cells changing shape, moving around, going through mitosis and proliferating - mostly in early embryos of various invertebrate animals such as insects, nematodes, echinoderms and ctenophores.
A time-lapse movie, if you don't know, is a movie made by taking a picture, waiting for a fixed amount of time, then taking another picture, and so on...
Just like any movie, really - but if you want to film cells dividing, you generally want to space the snapshots a few seconds apart, because it takes a few seconds for the scene to change perceptibly. That's just how slow the cytoskeleton moves, in most cells anyway. (It's important to keep the camera steady; if it's mounted on a microscope, make sure the table doesn't shake.)
You play the movie back at high speed, several frames per second, so you can see all of a fifteen-minute process in a few seconds.
Some of the movies in this gallery were made with a fluorescence microscope ("Live-label movies"). A specific molecule in the living cell is labeled with a fluorescent dye - actually a natural fluorescent protein - which absorbs high-energy (e.g., blue) light and emits lower-energy (e.g., green) light. With this method we can actually see how a particular kind of protein is distributed within the living cell. We just shine a strong blue light on the cells, and use a filter to let the green fluorescent through to the camera. If the cells contain a good deal of labeled tubulin, we can see green fluorescent microtubules growing, shrinking, and moving around - and during mitosis (or meiosis) the microtubule bundles of the spindle will be clearly visible.
Using genetic engineering methods, we can label any protein in this way. More about that later...
If you would like to know more about what you're seeing in any of these movies, feel free to ask me!
The Center for Cell Dynamics is unfortunately no longer operating at the UW's Friday Harbor Labs - it closed a couple years ago, due to a funding shortfall, and most of its members have gone to other places. It's nice that the website is still up.
Friday Harbor Labs itself is still going strong - if you ever want to spend a Spring or Summer term studying critters from the sea, it's one of the best places in the world to do that.
