About Biology

Italy - 19 - ♀ I'm studying molecular biology and collecting here all the fascinating pics I find while studying. - Hope you'll enjoy it!

[thelifeofamedstudent]

Tehehe Happy Valentine’s Day to all my fellow Science Nerds out there!

[heythereuniverse]

Flemming Christens Mitosis | Zeiss Microscopy 

Approximately 125 years before FUCCI imaging, German anatomist Walther Flemming (not to be confused with Alexander Fleming, the Scottish biologist who discovered Penicillin) was laying down the foundation of modern cell biology by deciphering the major steps of the cell cycle. With new dyes (i.e, aniline) to stain Chromosomen and essentially only the sun to illuminate his microscope, Flemming documented remarkable details of nuclear dynamics during mitosis, describing the process similar to how we think of it today.

[ihearthisto]

[genannetics]

A Beautiful time-lapse of HeLa Cell Division

This simple, gorgeous image of a HeLa cell (the cancer cell line commonly used for cell biology) undergoing mitosis is my favorite photograph from the 2012 Wellcome Image Awards.  Imagine, every cell that make up you and I undergo the same process.  

This composite confocal micrograph uses time-lapse microscopy to show a cancer cell (HeLa) undergoing cell division (mitosis). The DNA is shown in red, and the cell membrane is shown in cyan. The round cell in the centre has a diameter of 20 microns.

By Kuan-Chung Su and Mark Petronczki, London Research Institute, Cancer Research UK

[infinity-imagined]

Mitosis, Neurons, and the DNA replication complex.

[asapscience]

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Half female, half male.  Bilateral gynandromorphism is a rare genetic disorder occurring in insects, arachnids, crustaceans, and birds, where a strange combination of genetic material splits a creature perfectly in half, with one side male and one side female.

This is so god damn elegant and powerful. What even.

[sadviolences]

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Pic I took to some CCD-34Lu cells, (Human fibroblast), coloured with Giemsa. You can notice some of them in mitosis!

[justhangonsufferwell]

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Pic I took to my subculture of CEM cells (human acute lymphoblastic leukemia cells) after 5 days in incubator! I coloured them with Trypan blue and put in Bürker chamber… They turned out to be 4*10^6/mL (starting from 0,2*10^6/mL). Mitosis miracles! (:

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Non-sinusoidal bending waves of sperm flagella - C.J. Brokaw

A eukaryotic flagellum is a bundle of nine fused pairs of microtubule doublets surrounding two central single microtubules. The so-called "9+2" structure is characteristic of the core of the eukaryotic flagellum called an axoneme. At the base of a eukaryotic flagellum is a basal body, "blepharoplast" or kinetosome, which is the microtubule organizing center (MTOC) for flagellar microtubules and is about 500 nanometers long. Basal bodies are structurally identical to centrioles. The flagellum is encased within the cell's plasma membrane, so that the interior of the flagellum is accessible to the cell's cytoplasm.

Each of the outer 9 doublet microtubules extends a pair of dynein arms (an "inner" and an "outer" arm) to the adjacent microtubule; these dynein arms are responsible for flagellar beating, as the force produced by the arms causes the microtubule doublets to slide against each other and the flagellum as a whole to bend. These dynein arms produce force through ATP hydrolysis. The flagellar axoneme also contains radial spokes, polypeptide complexes extending from each of the outer 9 microtubule doublets towards the central pair, with the "head" of the spoke facing inwards. The radial spoke is thought to be involved in the regulation of flagellar motion, although its exact function and method of action are not yet understood.

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1919 welcome home party for Sturtevant on his return from military service in WWI. Parties and social events were not uncommon to the Fly group. Morgan hosted many of them.

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I decided to open this blog to collect all the fascinating pics I'm finding during my university studies (I'm studying molecular biology)...aaand I think this is good to begin with.

Drosophila melanogaster was among the first organisms used for genetic analysis, and today it is one of the most widely used and genetically best-known of all eukaryotic organisms. All organisms use common genetic systems; therefore, comprehending processes such as transcription and replication in fruit flies helps in understanding these processes in other eukaryotes, including humans.

Charles W. Woodworth is credited with being the first to breed Drosophila in quantity and for suggesting to W. E. Castle that they might be used for genetic research during his time at Harvard University.

Thomas Hunt Morgan began using fruit flies in experimental studies of heredity at Columbia University in 1910. His laboratory was located on the top floor of Schermerhorn Hall, which became known as the Fly Room. The Fly Room was cramped with eight desks, each occupied by students and their experiments. They started off experiments using milk bottles to rear the fruit flies and handheld lenses for observing their traits. The lenses were later replaced by microscopes, which enhanced their observations. The Fly Room was the source of some of the most important research in the history of biology. Morgan and his students eventually elucidated many basic principles of heredity, including sex-linked inheritance, epistasis, multiple alleles, and gene mapping.

"Thomas Hunt Morgan and colleagues extended Mendel's work by describing X-linked inheritance and by showing that genes located on the same chromosome do not show independent assortment. Studies of X-linked traits helped confirm that genes are found on chromosomes, while studies of linked traits led to the first maps showing the locations of genetic loci on chromosomes" (Freman 214). The first maps of Drosophila chromosomes were completed by Alfred Sturtevant.

(Thanks to my friend Alex for the pic.)