The earliest stages of life have been the subject of intense fascination for eons. Aristotle, for instance, observed and recorded the development of a chicken embryo in its egg.
He needed something the size of a hen’s egg to see what was going on, of course. But modern microscopes allow scientists to see not just the larva of a fruit fly, but each of 100,000 or so cells in that larva as they form, move and propagate as organs appear and the larva takes its shape.
But whereas Aristotle could easily analyze what he saw, the flood of data that new technology produces has overwhelmed the analytic abilities of scientists and many computers. It’s one thing to see every cell, but another to keep track of what they all do.
Now Fernando Amat, Philipp J. Keller and colleagues at Janelia Farm, a Virginia research campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, have developed software that can track each and every cell in a developing embryo.
The microscopes now yield more than kaleidoscopic images of organ formation; they offer sources of data on the path of each cell, what the researchers call fate mapping.
Dr. Keller, who specializes in developing the tools of light microscopy, said that with new computer programs, a researcher can pick out a single cell at any point in development and trace its life backward and forward during the embryo’s growth.
VITAL FORCE
