• Question: @kathryn the research that you are studying, how will it take to find out how fast the cells are developing and how does the 3D microscopy speed this up?

    Asked by libbysmith13 to Kat on 15 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Kathryn McMahon

      Kathryn McMahon answered on 15 Mar 2013:

      Hi @libby.
      I’m not quite sure what you mean about the how fast the cells are developing – do you mean looking at how fast the cells spread in the body? We use the 3D microscope for all sorts of things. We can look at live cells and watch them grow and move. We can look at blood vessel cells on their own or put a mixture of blood vessel cells and tumours cells in dish, and label them so that the vessel cells are fluorescent green and the tumour cells are red. We can take 3D movies to look at how quickly the vessels grow in response to the tumour cells or if the tumour cells behave differently in response to the blood vessels. Some cancers will line up along the blood vessels and some won’t, and this can be a sign of how aggressive the cancer is and how easily it will spread.

      We can also use a higher magnification to look at the cells in more detail – do the cancer cells change shape for example? The shape of the cells gives us clues as to how likely they are to spread, and there are a lot of scientists working on this and how we can stop them changing shape. This BBC news article has a pretty good description of how cell shape affects skin cancer (and the work was done by someone we work with!)
      http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7700264.stm

      In my last job, we used the 3D microscope to watch blood flowing through the vessels of live fish embryos (they’re see-through). We had genetically altered the fish so that their blood vessels glowed green and the blood cells glowed red. We got some AMAZING videos – so cool. In some labs, they even inject tumour cells into the fish embryos to see how they migrate around the body – the embryos are only a few millimetres long, so its pretty fiddly! There are some really nice videos of this if you click on the links on the page below. What you’re looking at is the red or blue tumour cells moving through the green vessels (in a live fish!!!).

      http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2886748/bin/jcs.069443_index.html

      I hope this answered your question – just comment if you want to know anything else, and I’ll reply.

Comments