Digital embryos
Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory have developed a novel microscopy technique to generate "digital embryos," 3D visualizations of early embryonic development down to the position of individual cells and the division of those cells. Their first big success, published recently in the journal Science, is a reconstruction of the first 24 hours of a Zebrafish embryo's development. The resulting movies are quite spectacular. From an EMBL press release:
Two newly developed technologies were key to the scientists' interdisciplinary approach to tracking a living zebrafish embryo from the single cell stage to 20,000 cells: a Digital Scanned Laser Light Sheet Microscope that scans a living organism with a sheet of light along many different directions so that the computer can assemble a complete 3D image, and a large-scale computing pipeline operated at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology...The Zebrafish digital embryo(European Molecular Biology Laboratory), "Digital zebrafish embryo" press release (EMBL), "Reconstruction of Zebrafish Early Embryonic Development by Scanned Light Sheet Microscopy" (Science, thanks Mark Pescovitz!)
"The digital embryo is like Google Earth for embryonic development. It gives an overview of everything that happens in the first 24 hours and allows you to zoom in on all cellular and even subcellular details," says Jochen Wittbrodt, who has recently moved from EMBL to the University of Heidelberg and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
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"Diaspora", here we come!
This system of automated embryogenesis analysis has been developed previously for the model organism C. elegans, a worm.
Here is a link to the lab that did the work:
http://waterston.gs.washington.edu/
Wonderful stuff. Very illuminating indeed. extraordinary.
But someone should tell their web guy/girl that there is absolutely no point in zipping those Quicktimes. Zip compression can't improve on the codec, so zipping them is just a waste of time.
#2: The imagery is similar, but the technique seems novel. The Waterston group use standard confocal microscopy, while the EMBL group have invented "digital scanned laser light sheet fluorescence microscopy". (DSLM)
To illustrate the innovation, here are two quotes from the Science paper:
"For comparison, 671 cells need to be followed during C. elegans embryogenesis, whereas the analysis of complex vertebrate embryos requires the simultaneous tracking of tens of thousands of cells."
"The most widely applied advanced fluorescence imaging techniques rely on confocal and multiphoton microscopes, which provide three-dimensional resolution but lack the combination of high-speed imaging and low phototoxicity required for the fast recording of entire embryos over long periods of time."