A Tale of Telophase

What am I looking at?  

This is an image of a cell during the final stage of cell division; click on the right arrow to see additional views of the process. The orange/red areas on the left and right are the chromosomes that will become the DNA of each daughter cell (1). The white lines between the groups of chromosomes are microtubules (2).

Biology in the background  

Cell division is the process by which a single cell turns into two copies of itself. Once the DNA and all the other cellular components have been moved to opposite ends of the cell, the cell can begin to cleave itself in two right down the center. This cleavage will eventually result in two copies of the original cell. The stage where all the cellular components have reached opposite ends of the cell and the cell begins to divide is called telophase.

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.