What's Wrong With This Picture 1?

What's Wrong With This Picture 1?

Stefano Santaguida

Koch Institute at MIT, MIT Department of Biology

As you look at this, millions of cells in your body are undergoing cell division. During this process, a mother cell will produce two daughter cells with exactly the same chromosome content.

In this image, a human cell – monitored by live cell imaging - is experiencing chromosome mis-segregation during cell division. The lagging chromosomes will be unevenly segregated and the daughter cells will have an unbalanced chromosome number, a condition known as “aneuploidy”. Aneuploidy has detrimental effects on the cell and it is a common feature of the vast majority of tumors. Ongoing efforts in the lab are aimed at understanding the consequences of chromosome mis-segregation on cell physiology with the hope to shed light on the impact of aneuploidy on tumorigenesis.

I took this image while I was following cells undergoing cell division. During this experiment I was trying to learn how different perturbations alter the fidelity of chromosome segregation.

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