Nuclear Implosion

These squashy shapes are nuclei – the tiny command centres found in many of our cells. There’s no important DNA inside these ones though, which is a huge relief, as they are being crushed. Researchers used a mathematical model to push these 'virtual' nuclei to destruction, examining how increasing environmental pressure (from left to right) crumples and deforms nuclear envelopes of different thicknesses (top to bottom). The team believe that as cells move about turbulent forces bear down on the nuclei inside. This can cause what mathematicians call a bifurcation – an unexpected dramatic change – in this case at the point where even the thickest cell starts to buckle under pressure. How the shape of the nucleus affects the delicate genetic machinery inside is a key question, and one which might reveal how cells handle so many pressures when making life or death decisions.

Written by John Ankers

Image from work by Dong-Hwee Kim and colleagues

Johns Hopkins Physical Sciences-Oncology Center, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

Image reproduced with permission from The Journal of Cell Science, Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd © 2015

Published in Journal of Cell Science, September 2015