Fruit flies, unlike humans, have ovaries that are comprised of small, stem-cell derived strings of cysts (called "ovarioles"; see image at left). The video is comprised of a series of images taken with a confocal microscope of one portion of an aberrant ovariole cyst. The idea behind confocal microscopy is that you can look through the "layers" of an image to try to get a sense for the actual, three-dimensional qualities of the mounted material (which, while squashed down on a slide, still has some depth and cannot all be visualized in the same focal plane). Some really nice software allows you to stack the images and play them back. Here, nuclei of particular cells are stained with a dye that binds between the "rungs" on the DNA ladder, making the nuclei of the cells within the cyst appear red under a fluorescent filter. By running through the stack in a video, you can easily visualize every cell within the cyst (which is how I realized that there was something seriously wrong with this fly's ovaries).
Continue
