The Mills Observatory, an opportunity to reach new audiences for public outreach.
Winter Season 2016/17 Installation.
This Outer Space | Inner Space (Project web page) installation includes an interactive video on the huge immersive screen (6m x 3m), a pop-up poster and live worms under a microscope with video screen.
The interactive video installation will include a short introduction video and then allow visitors to select short, visually attractive research videos about projects at Life Sciences, Dundee. The video links are placed on a Giant Worm on the big screen.
Introduction Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SZhH2vTWIM&feature=youtu.be
Interactive Giant Worm with research video links:
Research Videos
These videos appear as links on the Giant Worm and can be selected for viewing on the big screen. They are supported by the extended information presented on a poster outside the the viewing (planetarium) room. Website addresses can be supplied for further information.
From Egg to Worm
https://youtu.be/jk4kKnD1JyM
Voice Over
“What you see is a fertilised cell, what you will see is how it develops into a worm.
“It takes 8 hours to develop into a worm. When can you first see a worm?
“You also started off as a fertilised cell some nine months before you were born.”
Poster text
C. elegans is a nematode worm widely used as a model system to study development. The goal of developmental biology is to understand how an organism develops from a single fertilized egg.
We can study this process very well in C. elegans as its embryos are transparent and as it only takes 8 hours to generate a worm larva. What is so special about ‘the worm system’ is that development is invariant, we precisely know when cells are born and when and how they differentiate to make up a developing worm.
Scientists
Anton Gardner (a.gartner@dundee.ac.uk)
Weblinks
The Gartner Lab: lifesci.dundee.ac.uk/groups/anton_gartner
Seeing DNA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t9brjtwOco&feature=youtu.be
Voice Over
“Illumination with particles with a shorter wavelength than visible light enables smaller objects to be seen. Electron microscopes illuminate objects with short wavelength electrons that are focused using magnets instead of glass lenses. At first glance this might look like a comet flying through space. 100’s of thousands of particles are viewed and the images processed using techniques that are also used in astronomy. As a result it is possible to see biological material such as DNA in atomic detail.”
Poster Text
The wavelength of visible light limits resolution to about 50 nanometers (50 billionths of a meter). This is useful for looking inside cells, but not small enough to see the structure of individual molecules. Electrons have a shorter wavelength and improve resolution to 0.02 nanometers. Typically molecules are viewed for a fraction of a second before collisions with electrons damages them. By processing many thousands of images using approaches that are also used in astronomy this noise can be corrected for. The image shows DNA in association with the proteins that package it, recently obtained by researchers in Dundee.
Scientists
Tom Owen-Hughes (t.a.owenhughes@dundee.ac.uk)
Weblinks
The Tom Owen-Hughes Lab: lifesci.dundee.ac.uk/groups/tom-owen_hughes
Cell Suicide
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOlo4rUe2Ko
Voice Over
“Inside the worm we can see how cells die. Can you see them go pop? While you are watching this short movie, hundreds of thousands of your cells die, watching it happening in the worm, can help us to find out how.”
Poster text
Apoptosis is the ordered elimination of cells by suicide. It appears counterintuitive that cellular suicide occurs, but this process is needed to cull unwanted cells during development and disease; during early embryonic development the end of our hands look like mittens, only when cells between the fingers die they become apparent. Cancer is prevented by killing damaged cells by apoptosis. 131 C. elegans cells die during development, and scientists found out the basic mechanisms of how apoptosis works and showed that they are essentially the same in worms and us.
Scientists
Anton Gardner (a.gartner@dundee.ac.uk)
Weblinks
The Gartner Lab: lifesci.dundee.ac.uk/groups/anton_gartner
Genes and Structure
https://youtu.be/3noVqAyijY8
Voice over
“A major advantage of C. elegans is the capability o take movies inside the living organism. Here you see how cells divide. Red is the genetic material, green is the structure that separates the genetic material.”
Poster text
A major advantage of studying C. elegans is the capability to take movies inside a worm. We can visualize how Oocytes are fertilized and how fertilized cells divide, all inside the organism. Not only this, it is also possible to visualize key building blocks of live, and to watch how those proteins behave in real time. In red we can see a protein called histone that helps organizing the genetic material when cells divide. In green we see a protein that makes a structure called microtubule and how microtubules separate the genetic material when cells divide.
Scientists
Paul Appleton (p.l.appleton@dundee.ac.uk)
Anton Gardner (a.gartner@dundee.ac.uk)
Weblinks
The Gartner Lab: lifesci.dundee.ac.uk/groups/anton_gartner
Dundee Imaging Facility: lifesci.dundee.ac.uk/technologies/dundee-imaging-facility
The Difference
https://youtu.be/VU4JIhdxqc4
Voice Over
“In the right panel look at the dividing cell with a light microscope. You can’t see the difference between the two cell that develop so in the left panel we use fluorescence microscopy, lighting up a single building block that defines the different feature of the right cell.”
Poster text
We all start off as a single cell. Once we have grown up we are made out of something like 200 cell types. We can study how cells become different by studying them in C. elegans. What we can show is how cells become different from each other already during the first cell division.
We show this first division in two different ways. In the right you see that after the first cell division, one cell is bigger than the other one. Both cells give rise to different types of cells. Indeed, the smaller one for instance will give rise to oocytes and sperm. In the left panel you see the same two cells but here one protein called PAR-2 is visualized by using fluorescent light. PAR-2 accumulates around the right cell. Indeed when no PAR-2 protein is around, both cells are identical and do not differentiate from each other.
Scientists
Anton Gardner (a.gartner@dundee.ac.uk)
Weblinks
The Gartner Lab: lifesci.dundee.ac.uk/groups/anton_gartner
Slidable Worm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1PEdTz69aY&feature=youtu.be
Voice Over
“Using an electron microscope we look at the worm in slices to see all its organs with amazing resolution. The worms have a mouth and love eating bacteria. The muscles around the mouth squeeze the bacteria. As they move further into the worm the mouth is getting narrower and the bacteria are ground up and start being disgested. Finally the leftovers that can’t be used are discharged.”
Poster text
Using electron microscopy provides us with jet another way of looking inside worms. We can look at tissues, individual cells and also into the inside of cells. Taking a series of such sections, we scan through the entire worm, and this is exactly what we will show, generating a movie as we pass section through section. The worm can thus be analyzed with amazing resolution. This is actually the way how the position of all the 302 neurons and all their interconnections were located.
Scientists
Anton Gardner (a.gartner@dundee.ac.uk)
Weblinks
The Gartner Lab: lifesci.dundee.ac.uk/groups/anton_gartner
The Cell Divides
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57TbIkgkbqU&feature=youtu.be
Voice Over
“When cells divide, they have to separate their genetic code. Here the genetic code is visualised in red. What you will see is how it will separate and end up in two cells. Every minute millions of cells divide in your body.”
Poster text
One of the most fascinating and important phenomenon of life is the duplication of the genetic information, which has to occur each time a cell divides. In us the genetic code is made of 3 billion letters, in worms it is still an impressive 100 million. What you see is the cell boundaries labeled in green, and chromosomes, which carry the genetic information, labeled in red. Here you see the chromosomes just after a cell divided into two. What we will show is a movie where chromosomes are distributed into the two daughter cells. Such separation is necessary to preserve the genetic information.
Scientists
Anton Gardner (a.gartner@dundee.ac.uk)
Weblinks
The Gartner Lab: lifesci.dundee.ac.uk/groups/anton_gartner
Coloured Worm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2CWUmY9Svs&feature=youtu.be
Voice Over
“What is it? You will see the mystery worm. We will shine red light on it and see some neurons in red. We will shine green light on it and we see some other neurons in green. Finally with blue light we see neurons in blue. (movie starts) The worm has 302 neurons almost every third cell is a neuron! It’s actually much smarter than you. There are billions of neurons in your brain. As you can imagine it is very hard to study those and this is why we use the worm. Lightening up and colour coding individual neurons is our trick.”
Poster text
To understand how an organism works, we actually want to visualize cells in living organisms. What you see is a picture of a moving worm with a red dot inside the worm. What we actually do is to visualize a certain set of neurons by expressing a protein only in those neurons. The trick is that the protein is designed such that it emits red light and this is what we see. We can play this trick with different neurons using different colours. What you will see is worms where different types of neurons are lit up by red, green and blue light. Why is this important? For instance Parkinson’s disease is a disease were one type of neurons, dopaminergic neurons are primarily affected. We can study the very same neurons in worms, and this is relevant to understand the disease. In read we label those dopaminergic neurons.
Scientists
Anton Gardner (a.gartner@dundee.ac.uk)
Weblinks
The Gartner Lab: lifesci.dundee.ac.uk/groups/anton_gartner