Image of a developing seedling shows the cellular outlines in the epidermis, the outermost layer of the leaf. (Image credit: Andrew Muroyama)
Image of a developing seedling shows the cellular outlines in the epidermis, the outermost layer of the leaf. (Image credit: Andrew Muroyama) Biologists observing the formation of leaves noticed the nuclei moved in bewildering ways. Further investigation uncovered proteins that act as compasses and motors, guiding the divisions of individual cells to create the overall pattern of the leaf. The stem cells tasked with creating and maintaining biological tissues have a difficult job. They have to precisely divide to form new specialized cells, which are destined to different fates even though they contain identical DNA. An obvious question then is: How do the cells divide in all the right ways to produce a healthy tissue? This was the grand motivating question for Andrew Muroyama, a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of Stanford University biologist Dominique Bergmann , as he monitored days of leaf development in the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana . There, amongst a thousand cells under his microscope, he noticed that the nucleus - the DNA-containing control center in the cell - moved in unexpected and strangely purposeful ways as stem cells divided.
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