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upstart writes:

Peering deep into the cellular universe: Allen Institute researchers map cell parts in 3D:

Our cells are built from smaller structures that specialize in the key tasks of life, from cell division to cellular trash collection. And how those smaller parts fit together in three dimensions can affect the health of cells and of the body.

Researchers at Seattle's Allen Institute for Cell Science and their colleagues have now developed a way to quantitatively map how these cellular components are arranged in space. Their approach, published in Nature, has the potential to be adapted broadly by scientists to investigate how cells operate.

The researchers analyzed more than 200,000 human stem cells at high resolution in three dimensions. They assessed the position of multiple internal structures, each visualized by a fluorescent label.

[...] The researchers found that some structures were always located in about the same place, whereas others showed more variability in their placement. They could measure how cellular organization shifted as cells entered cell division or otherwise changed state. And they could simulate cell transitions such as changes in the cytoskeleton that occur in cells at the edge of a cell colony. .

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