Biology, dauntingly complex as it is, nevertheless is slowly becoming more quantitative and thus more amenable to testable models and predictions. For example, an embryo’s various organs and body parts develop at different times and at different rates. How can one come up with a rigorous model for the process? James Sharpe (Centre for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona, Spain) and his colleagues are beginning to address that question with a new imaging technique: time-lapse optical projection tomography. Their setup involves taking live tissue from a mouse embryo and transferring it on tungsten pins to a nutrient- and oxygen-rich chamber. The pins are on a mount that is magnetically attached to a micromanipulator, which rotates the tissue through 360° in 100—200 steps. Labeling gene activity within the tissue with green fluorescent protein and using deep-penetrating 800-nm light, the researchers acquired a full set of images every 15 minutes. The images here of...
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1 July 2008
July 01 2008