Monday, March 9, 2009

Mitosis movies!

No, not movies of the digits at the end of my feet - movies of cell division. All of them are speeded up: mitosis takes many minutes.

This one shows the spindle (green) that pulls the chromosomes (red) apart.

The fifth movie on this page is a movie showing multiple cells undergoing mitosis as a sea urchin embryo grows. The spindles show up as white.

Rat kidney cells undergoing mitosis are visible if you look for the heading "Chromosomes and the spindle" on this page, and then open the movie.

ANIMATIONS

A good animation of mitosis, with explanations, is here.

Here's a nice 3D animation, with a "zoom in" to the nucleus at the start (and ridiculous music).

A simplified, step-by-step animation (with a quiz afterwords) can be found here. Great if you're having trouble following the other animations.