Saturday, June 02, 2007

Science is Purty
or Procrastinating when I should be Working on a Talk

Here's a nice movie I made if some cells:


These are human U2OS cells
An osteosarcoma (bone cancer) cell line originally isolated from the tibia of a 15-yr old girl many years ago. I've put the DNA sequence that encodes for a microtubule end-binding protein fused to a red fluorescent protein into the cells, and it has been integrated into the genome so that the cells will continuously express it, and when you shine a certain wavelength of light on them you can see the protein fluorescing. (This protein is already in the cells naturally, but without the fluorescent tag, so you can't see it so easily)
They are just kinda hanging out being happy here, normal life.
These are shown here about 1000x actual size.
(This movie is sped up about 5 times or so faster than real time, but you can actually see these things moving in real time in the scope)

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