Dr. Guangshuo Ou’s group at the Institute of Biophysics, CAS, published an article on Nature Protocols in December 2012, entitled “Live imaging of cellular dynamics during Caenorhabditis elegans postembryonic development” introducing a novel system to study the postembryonic development of C. elegans with fluorescence microscopy.

Postembryonic development is an essential step during the formation of multicellular organisms after embryonic growth. For example, C. elegans adults are composed of 959 somatic cells, and more than 400 of them are generated in the postembryonic stage. High-resolution live imaging has been widely performed in embryos and provides a wealth of information for understanding embryonic development. In contrast, methods to study postembryonic development by fluorescence live microscopy are still scarce. In this article, the authors described their live-imaging system to observe the cellular dynamics during C. elegans postembryonic development, and discussed the potential problems in the application as well. Together with C. elegans genetics, this method has been successfully applied by Dr. Ou’s group in their recent studies, including: identification of molecular markers of migrating cells (Ou & Vale, Journal of Cell Biology, 2009), discovery of a novel asymmetric cell division mechanism (Ou et al., Science, 2010), investigation of autophagy gene functions in degrading apoptotic cell corpse (Li et al., Journal of Cell Biology, 2012) and uncovering of the apoptotic mimicry in the midbody clearance (Chai et al., Journal of Cell Biology, 2012).

This work was supported by grants from the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, the Natural Science Foundation of China and Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Figure legend: The cartoon shows the migration of Q neuroblasts and their descendants in the L1 larval stage.

Article link：http://www.nature.com/nprot/journal/v7/n12/full/nprot.2012.128.html