Meet the chickens - taste of fluorescent microscopy

Welcome again. This time in the Meet the Chickens theme we will look at the DT40 chicken cells under the microscope.

Picture taken by Kliszczak M.(NUIG)

What you can see here is just a bunch of DT40 cells where DNA is stained with DAPI (blue dye). This is a grayscale format and normally under microscope DNA would appear as bright blue. Let's take a closer look to cells indicated with the red frames.
Cell with number 2 is a regular interphase cell (interphase cell is a cell which is not in the division phase). As you see there is a lot of cells looking similar to cell number 2. Mmajor population of the DT40 cells is "sitting" in the interphase (either G1, S or G2 phase of the cell cycle).

Cell number 5 is a cell which just started to condense the DNA. Final stage of the DNA condensation are chromosomes which you could see in the previous post on the Meet the chickens section (see the post rom 16th October). What you can observe here is that shape of the DNA is no longer round like but becomes clumpy and more dense.

Cell number 3 is a cell which is in the metaphase of the mitosis where already condensed chromosomes align in the center of the cell (metaphase plate). In the next step chromosomes will be pulled to opposite poles of the cell. Final stage of that event is being captured in the cells number 4.

Cell number 4, actually cells number 4 are just finising the division. You can see that each cell line got its set of the chromosomes. In the next step chromosomes will decondensed and each of the cells will enter next cell cycle.

If you look at the cell number 1 what you will see is a abnormal mitosis where condensed chromosomes are pulled to three (instead of two) different poles. This is abnormal as the cell before the division duplicates the DNA (cell do not triplicate it) so there is not enough of the genetic material to divide it between three new cells.

Usually this kind of the abnormal cells are eliminated because they simply are not healthy cells (they contain wrong amount of the DNA).

I hope you enjoy it and start to like the chickens.

GGS