cells

Red loops on a black background are dotted with bright red flecks and pale blue ovals as part of a confocal microscope image of bone marrow cells.

A loopy baseline

Studying cancers means also knowing what healthy cells look like. In this case, mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) from healthy bone marrow are a bit…

24 November 2020

A series of images demonstrates the cell cycle trajectory, the first frame in each row shows a cell’s nucleus in grey. As it moves through its life cycle and enters new phases, markers change colour from red to green to pinpoint progression.

Deep learning captures cell cycle

Members of an EMBL-led research group with collaborators in Estonia and Russia have built and trained a deep learning model to better understand how…

6 October 2020

Fruit fly larval cells looking like blue lightning

Breathing beneath the skin

Beautiful flashes of blue colour help light the way for researchers to study cells in fruit fly larva that provide oxygen to…

25 August 2020

When life takes shape

Today’s picture of the week is not only a colourful one, it is also a snapshot of the vast number of shapes that the cells inside an animal body…

20 August 2019

By Doreen Feike

Patchwork-like image of developing zebrafish sensory organ. Picture credits: Virginie Lecaudey / EMBL.

Picture Release

This image may bring to mind a patchwork quilt, or a picture taken from a gallery of abstract paintings, but the artisan behind it is actually Mother…

15 June 2010

This image represents the integration of genomic, metabolic, proteomic, structural and cellular information about Mycoplasma pneumoniae in this project: one layer of an Electron Tomography scan of a bottle-shaped M. pneumoniae cell (grey) is overlaid with a schematic representation of this bacterium’s metabolism, where blue indicates interactions between proteins encoded in genes from the same functional unit. Apart from these expected interactions, the scientists found that, surprisingly, many proteins are multifunctional. For instance, there were various unexpected physical interactions (yellow lines) between proteins and the subunits that form the ribosome, which is depicted as an Electron microscopy image (yellow). Image credit: Takuji Yamada / EMBL

First-ever blueprint of a minimal cell is more complex than expected

What are the bare essentials of life, the indispensable ingredients required to produce a cell that can survive on its own? Can we describe the…

26 November 2009

The microscope image of the dorsal closure of a fly embryo shows alternating stripes of epithelial cells with aligned microtubule bundles (green) and epithelial cells treated with a microtubule-destroying drug (blue). Labelled in red is the protein actin that lines the border of cells, particularly the amnioserosa cells occupying the eye-shaped opening.

Uncovering how cells cover gaps

Researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, came a step closer to understanding how cells close gaps not…

25 June 2009

Picture Release

What at the first sight could be pictures of planets or other cosmic structures are actually microscope images of balls (cysts) of human kidney…

22 October 2008

Lost in the labyrinth

Blood cells have limited lifespans, which means that they must be continually replaced by calling up reserves and turning these into the blood cell…

3 September 2006

A wandering eye

Eyes are among the earliest recognisable structures in an embryo; they start off as bulges on the sides of tube-shaped tissue that will eventually…

25 August 2006

A double punch for female survival

Achieving equality between the sexes can be a challenge even for single cells. Since evolution began removing bits of male DNA to create the…

25 August 2005