ASCB Celldance 2015 premieres three videos featuring live cell imaging

December 15, 2015

ASCB’s Celldance Studios released Monday (Dec. 14) three new short videos made by cell scientists, featuring dramatic live cell imaging.

The videos, which take advantage of accelerating advances in super-resolution imaging, fluorescent tagging, and Big Data manipulation, where made in the labs of Douglas Robinson at John Hopkins University, John Condeelis at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Satyajit Mayor at the National Centre for the Biological Sciences (NCBS) in India.

The videos were announced at the 2015 American Society for Cell Biology annual meeting.


Edison Leung et al., Albert Einstein College of Medicine for ASCB Celldance 2015 | Spying on Cancer Cell Invasion

Edison Leung says his cancer research lab makes movies of all genres—horror, action, thriller, and war—all shot inside cancer tumors. Working alongside Allison Harney in the Einstein lab of John Condeelis, Leung’s Celldance video shows metastasizing cancer cells, helped by the body’s own immune cells called macrophages, break through a blood vessel wall and escape to form new tumors. Through live cell imaging, Leung’s video captures the moment the cancer cell and the macrophage work as a team to break through the vessel wall of a mouse.


Satyajit Mayor, National Centre for Biological Science, India, for ASCB Celldance 2015 | At the Cell’s Edge

In this video made the Mayor lab in Bangalore, researchers give a detailed account of their exploration of the churning lipids and proteins on the cell surface, illustrated by startling live cell videos, high-tech simulations, and low-tech white boards. “At the Cell’s Edge” paints the cell membrane as a restless nanoscale seascape.


Douglas Robinson, Johns Hopkins University for ASCB Celldance 2015 | Shape Shifting Cells

The Robinson lab video is a visual extravaganza of high-resolution microscopy, mathematical representations, animation, and live action. It starts with a basic question: why are cancer cells softer than normal cells? It ends with a potential drug that can turn hardness against pancreatic cancer cells. Their cell story walks us through the stages of discovery — the shape and hardness of cells, cell cannibalism where the soft (cancer) eat the hard (normal), an amoeba model to see the proteins that stiffen cells, and the identification of 4HAP, a small protein that attacks pancreatic cancer cells.