UCSF Tetrad Granlibakken Skits 2006.
Aquatic cell division at its finest.
A very good and educational movie from the brilliant UCSF people. This Tetrad program is an integrative biology program in UCSF, one of the top in the States. I applied for it two years ago but got rejected. It left me no choice but went to my current school, ha-ha. Lots of top faculties in my school were recruited from UCSF. There is a joke here talking about we see UCSF as our farm system of faculties. I was told by Chris that UCSF is(was?) a tough place for PhD students. Students there had to pass two qualify exams, one for thesis and one for non-thesis. Geez...
Okay, here is what happened in this movie.
Second 4: It appears that the cell is in G2 phase or G2/M boundary. Chromosomes grouped and centrosomes stayed together on a virtual nuclear membrane.
Second 10: Centrosomes segregated toward two opposed poles. This step is difficult to judge the cell was in which subphase since differnt cells make it happened at different subphases. Based on what had been shown in this movie, since the virtual nuclear membrane was still intact, this cell should be in prophase.
Second 15: Nuclear membrane break down (NMBD) happened so the cell was in prometaphase. Centrosomes nucleated spindle started to capture chromosomes throught the famous feature named "dynamic instability".
Second 23: All chromosome were captured by spindles and properly aligned in the equatorial plane. Therefore this cell was in metaphase.
Second 31: Spindle checkpoint got inactivated and chromosome segregated quickly and robustly. Cell processed into anaphase and cytokinesis. There are two stages in anaphase, A and B. In anaphase A, centrosomes stay at the same localization but spindles between chromosomes and centrosomes were shortened. And two centrosomes start to move further apart from equatorial plane in Anaphase B. But, just like what this movie showed, cytokinesis is a very robust and fast reaction, anaphase in this movie is so fast that anaphase A and B were difficult to make a clear distinguishment between.
Second 34: It looks like a membrane insertion mechanism. If that is the case, this cell could be a embryo or stem cell. A alternative explanation is this is a plant cell division so in the last step it built a cell plane between two daughter cells.
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6 comments:
Oh, I have no idea you applied to UCSF before. Tetrad is quite reluctant to take internationals, you may know that. Anyway, maybe Tetrad is not that good...You know, Stanford really beat us in Nobel this time...
But interestingly, to my knowledge, many of our faculty members actually come from your school and JHU...maybe there is some kind of mutual farming going on?
Yeah... UCSF mentioned it on the website. But it's like buying lottery tickets, spending some money for a hope. You never know what will happen. Although I didn't hit the jackpot...
As the Nobel prize, I guess no one can do it worse than my school. People usually got awarded right after they left here. Now we can only comfort ourselves by hosting the Ig Nobel every year.
I don't know many faculties in UCSF were from my school. The joke I mentioned is about a public letter written by my PhD advisor Tim Mitchison and my PhD advisor's PhD advisor Marc Kirschner (both were UCSF professors). Said they cherished UCSF faculty body as their valuable farm, helping them determine who is the best among those junior faculties and qualify to join our royal community. Maybe you are right. Many people in our department are from bay area. One San Francisco native postdoc ever said to me that graduate students in SF like moving to Boston for their postdoc. Two cities are pretty similar, no matter in city size, population, and number of top institutes. But at the end he though it is a trap, stuck SF people in Boston for years as cheap labor plus a very baaaaaaaaaaaad weather.
The examples I heard are mostly faculty members in the hospital,not in the research system. As for the weather part, I guess SF definitely beats the sxxt out of Boston :) Only in fall we are equal...Uh, I admit, maybe autumn in New England is more beautiful. To host the Ig Nobel is good too, at least it provides more laughter to the world than the authentic Nobel thing.
This fall, not surprisingly, the rain stands out the stage of NE's foliage. So, we won't have good scenery this year....Sigh~~ Maybe SF even beats NE in this part, too... :(
At least New England Patriots is better than San Francisco 49ers.
OH YEAH!
Yeah, and Red Sox is definitely better than Giants. [Sigh...] Now I tell others I am a fan of A's.
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