Check out the beautiful review titled “The balance between adhesion and contraction during cell division” from Dylan Burnette’s lab, specifically Nilay Taneja, that my graduate student, Lindsay Rathbun, and I were lucky to contribute to. Featured below is a stunning Figure Nilay put together. It’s fantastic and shows the power of Structured Illumination Microscopy.
Figure 1. (a) Structured illumination microscopy micrograph of HeLa cell at metaphase, stained for α-tubulin (yellow), actin filaments (magenta) and myosin IIA (cyan). The mitotic spindle comprises spindle microtubules, that facilitate chromosome segregation and dictate furrow positioning, and astral microtubules that play a pivotal role in spindle positioning by interacting with the actin cortex. Myosin II is uniformly distributed at the cortex during metaphase. (b) Upon anaphase onset, myosin II is enriched at the equator to ingress the cleavage furrow. Note the extensive contacts between the mitotic spindle and the contractile cortex, suggesting cross-talk between these two cytoskeletal networks. Note that the actin bundles protruding from the cells are not retraction fibers, as they are not attached to the substrate. Scale bar: 10 μm.