'Internal clock' found within live human cells
"Previously, a precise point of a cell in its life cycle could only be determined by studying dead cells," explains Alexandra Zidovska, an assistant professor of physics at New York University and the senior author of research, which appears in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "However, with this discovery, which shows that the nucleus exhibits rapid fluctuations that decrease during the life cycle of the cell, we can enhance our knowledge of both healthy and diseased human cells." The study, which also included Fang-Yi Chu, an NYU doctoral candidate, and Shannon Haley, an NYU undergraduate, sought to expand our understanding of the cell nucleus during the cell cycle. It's long been established that the shape and size of the cell nucleus change dramatically during a cell's life. Unknown, however, was whether or not the nucleus changes its shape over short periods of time. This was largely due to ...