Surface Fluctuations and Coalescence of Nucleolar Droplets in the Human Cell Nucleus.

The nucleolus is a membraneless organelle embedded in chromatin solution inside the cell nucleus. By analyzing surface dynamics and fusion kinetics of human nucleoli in vivo, we find that the nucleolar surface exhibits subtle, but measurable, shape fluctuations and that the radius of the neck connecting two fusing nucleoli grows in time as r(t)∼t^{1/2}. This is consistent with liquid droplets with low surface tension ∼10^{-6}  N m^{-1} coalescing within an outside fluid of high viscosity ∼10^{3}  Pa s. Our study presents a noninvasive approach of using natural probes and their dynamics to investigate material properties of the cell and its constituents.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Physical Review Letters

• Publication date

  2018-10-05

• Fields of study

  Biology, Materials Science, Physics, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.148101PMID 30339413PMCID PMC6452643
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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