Question: how do you make a movie from cells

Helen Tunbridge answered on 18 Jun 2013:

WELL. We have a special microscope system which allows single images of the magnified cells to be taken over a long time period, these individual pictures can be played one after another to build up a movie. So we take images every 20 seconds, over the course of 15 minutes and can see the cells moving around, making contact with other cells and over the course of 15 minutes, you can see components inside the cell changing position after the cell has interacted with another cell. The reason we can do this quite slowly (only 3 pictures a minute would make a very boring movie if it was of humans!) is that cells move quite slowly in real time, so if we take fewer images per minute, that speeds it up and makes it easier to look at and analyse.