Metaphase Meetup

What am I looking at?  

These are images of a cell during cell division. The orange/yellow coloring in the middle is the DNA packed into chromosomes (1). The white lines forming a sphere around the DNA are microtubules (2).

Click on the right arrow to see an image highlighting the microtubules during this phase of cell division.

Biology in the background  

Cell division is the process of a single cell turning into two daughter cells – nearly identical copies of itself. To do this, the original cell needs to copy all its cellular components, including its DNA. Once these copies are made, the DNA is packed into chromosomes, then lined up in the center of the cell and attached to microtubules in preparation for being pulled apart into the two daughter cells.

The divvying between the daughter cells of the other cellular components, like organelles and cytoplasm, happens at random. However, a fair and equal splitting of the cell’s genetic material is critical. This is why eukaryotic cells evolved very complex machinery to ensure that the DNA is split evenly between the daughter cells. The stage of cell division when this alignment of the chromosomes occurs is called metaphase.

A microtubule is about 25 nanometers in diameter, or roughly 4,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, and a chromosome is between 1 and 2 micrometers long, or roughly 50 to 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Technique  

These images were created using fluorescence microscopy.