Photo: Getty Images
Here's today's feel-good story:
Scientists have discovered a new way to see how human cells organize themselves. They believe that this will shed a modern light on the building blocks of life.
Rich details about the variation in shapes of cells were discovered in a new database of 200,000 images, with the research being a culmination of all of the work that the Allen Institute for Cell Science has been doing since it opened 8 years ago.
“Part of what makes cell biology seem intractable is the fact that every cell looks different, even when they are the same type of cell,” said Wallace Marshall, a Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California in San Francisco, and member of the Allen Institute’s Advisory Board.
“This same variability that has long plagued the field is, in fact, an opportunity to study the rules by which a cell is put together (and) I expect that many others will adopt the same methodology.”