Like many research institutes around the country, the Allen Institute for Cell Science wound down its laboratory operations in March and shifted primarily to remote work in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This was uncharted territory for all of us, but we remained very much open for science and are now contemplating our limited return to the Institute. Our researchers are working hard from home, analyzing data, synthesizing their insights into new manuscripts, and leading and participating in virtual workshops and conferences, sharing our work with the community. Of course, our cell images, data and other resources are growing and open for anyone to access remotely at allencell.org.

Stories

Cell Shorts | A new discovery about ALS

A research team at Northwestern University discovered a strange and literal wrinkle in the nuclei of neurons from ALS patients. Now, they’re using resources from the Allen Institute for Cell Science to study these features in more detail.

Read about the discovery ►︎

Two new cell lines released

Two new gene-edited stem cell lines have been added to the Allen Cell Collection. The first is a triple-edited cell line, in which all three subcompartments of the nucleolus are labeled: the fibrillar center, the dense fibrillar component and the granular component. The second visualizes mitochondrial nucleoids via the mEGFP-tagged mitochondrial transcription factor A (TFAM).

Explore the cell catalog ►︎

New Virtual Science Lab webinar series

The Allen Institute is excited to launch a new webinar series for educators, The Virtual Science Lab. We're highlighting free lesson plans that guide teachers and students through fully virtual experiments using our open data.

The first webinar in this series, "The Virtual Science Lab: Mitosis and Microscopy," features a demonstration of a ready-to-use virtual lab and lesson for intermediate or advanced high school students and college students. This lesson guides students through conducting a real experiment completely online.

Learn more and register for webinar ►︎

Distance Learning for Cell Biology

The Allen Institute for Cell Science’s Graham Johnson and Washington State University’s Eric Shelden led a webinar demonstrating an open lesson plan for distance learning in cell biology, using Allen Institute for Cell Science resources on mitosis. The video and a written transcript of the Q&A are available online.

Watch the webinar ►︎

Cell Feature Explorer

Take a tour through the Cell Feature Explorer, a cell biology data-exploration tool from the Allen Institute for Cell Science, in our new video.

Watch the video ►︎

Cell image contest

Recently, we held a contest for our researchers to share images they created with the pathtrace-rendering software AGAVE or the Cell Feature Explorer.

Above, the two winning images. Left: A full-field view of stem cells showing MYH10 (blue), a non-muscle myosin, nuclei (pink) and cell boundaries (green), winner of the “visually stunning” category taken by Melissa Hendershott. Right: Mitochondria (white) and DNA (green) in pro-metaphase, winner of the “biologically intriguing” category taken by Sue Ludmann.

See more beautiful cell images in the visually stunning and biologically intriguing categories.

In the News

WSU professors create virtual lab on cell development

WSU News, April 22, 2020

Science-ing from home

Nature, March 26, 2020