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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- Developmental Biology
- Physics of Living Systems
Shape changes of epithelia during animal development, such as convergent extension, are achieved through the concerted mechanical activity of individual cells. While much is known about the corresponding large-scale tissue flow and its genetic drivers, fundamental questions regarding local control of contractile activity on the cellular scale and its embryo-scale coordination remain open. To address these questions, we develop a quantitative, model-based analysis framework to relate cell geometry to local tension in recently obtained time-lapse imaging data of gastrulating Drosophila embryos. This analysis systematically decomposes cell shape changes and T1 rearrangements into internally driven, active, and externally driven, passive, contributions. Our analysis provides evidence that germ band extension is driven by active T1 processes that self-organize through positive feedback acting on tensions. More generally, our findings suggest that epithelial convergent extension results from the controlled transformation of internal force balance geometry which combines the effects of bottom-up local self-organization with the top-down, embryo-scale regulation by gene expression.
