27 T ultra-high static magnetic field changes orientation and morphology of mitotic spindles in human cells
- Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
- University of Science and Technology of China, China
- Harvard Medical School, United States
Abstract
Purified microtubules have been shown to align along the static magnetic field (SMF) in vitro because of their diamagnetic anisotropy. However, whether mitotic spindle in cells can be aligned by magnetic field has not been experimentally proved. In particular, the biological effects of SMF of above 20 T (Tesla) have never been reported. Here we found that in both CNE-2Z and RPE1 human cells spindle orients in 27 T SMF. The direction of spindle alignment depended on the extent to which chromosomes were aligned to form a planar metaphase plate. Our results show that the magnetic torque acts on both microtubules and chromosomes, and the preferred direction of spindle alignment relative to the field depends more on chromosome alignment than microtubules. In addition, spindle morphology was also perturbed by 27 T SMF. This is the first reported study that investigated the cellular responses to ultra-high magnetic field of above 20 T. Our study not only found that ultra-high magnetic field can change the orientation and morphology of mitotic spindles, but also provided a tool to probe the role of spindle orientation and perturbation in developmental and cancer biology.
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Author details
Funding
national key research and development program of china (#2016YFA0400900)
- Xin Zhang
National Natural Science Foundation of China (U1532151)
- Xin Zhang
Hefei Science Center (2016HSC-IU007)
- Xin Zhang
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2017, Zhang et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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27 T ultra-high static magnetic field changes orientation and morphology of mitotic spindles in human cells
eLife 6:e22911.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.22911
Further reading
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- Physics of Living Systems
Vertebrates have evolved great diversity in the number of segments dividing the trunk body, however, the developmental origin of the evolvability of this trait is poorly understood. The number of segments is thought to be determined in embryogenesis as a product of morphogenesis of the pre-somitic mesoderm (PSM) and the periodicity of a molecular oscillator active within the PSM known as the segmentation clock. Here, we explore whether the clock and PSM morphogenesis exhibit developmental modularity, as independent evolution of these two processes may explain the high evolvability of segment number. Using a computational model of the clock and PSM parameterised for zebrafish, we find that the clock is broadly robust to variation in morphogenetic processes such as cell ingression, motility, compaction, and cell division. We show that this robustness is in part determined by the length of the PSM and the strength of phase coupling in the clock. As previous studies report no changes to morphogenesis upon perturbing the clock, we suggest that the clock and morphogenesis of the PSM exhibit developmental modularity.
