Seeing Cells Up Close: A Virtual Exploration of Cell Division
A Bay AREA SciENCE FESTIVAL 2020 EVENT
Wednesday October 21, 3-4 PM PDT
Open to all ages!
No prior science knowledge necessary!
Register to the Bay Area Science Festival (free!) to get the Zoom link to this and other festival events.
Come join the Dumont Lab at UCSF for a virtual tour, science demonstration, and Q&A with our scientists! Attendees will be entered to win free Foldscopes!
We invite you, from the comfort and safety of your home (wherever you are!), to join the Dumont Lab and the Bay Area Science Festival for our virtual science event! We’ll introduce you to some of our favorite research questions: what does the inside of a cell look like? how does stuff move around inside cells? and how do cells pull and divide themselves in two when it’s time to make new cells?
After that, we’ll show you how we spend our days doing research. You’ll see a demonstration on our cutting-edge microscope that lets us look at cells up close, shoot lasers at those cells, and poke them with needles to learn about how the parts inside move. We’ll also share some exciting movies of cell division and answer any questions you might have about cells, microscopes, or what it’s like to be a scientist. Throughout the event, we will be giving away three Foldscope Deluxe Individual Kits to lucky participants so you can try microscopy at home. All virtual attendees will be entered in a raffle to win!
More about cell division
Across all forms of life, cells divide in a process called mitosis. Division of one mother cell into two daughter cells can occur either for maintenance, replacing old or dying cells with newly divided ones, or for tissue growth, adding new cells so plants and animals can get bigger. During this cell division process, it is very important that chromosomes (A.K.A. DNA) are divided evenly between daughter cells. Mistakes and errors in chromosome number after cell division can lead to diseases such as cancer. When they divide, cells build the mitotic spindle, a machine (the green structure in the above image) that attaches to chromosome pairs and generates force to pull them apart into daughter cells. In the Dumont Lab, we want to understand how cells make sure they get the right chromosomes, how they generate the force that’s needed to divide, and how building blocks work together to make this happen.