Drosophila Melanogaster is a key model organism used across the LMB to study fundamental aspects of biology. This image for day 259 of #LMB365 shows the dorsal portion of the fly thorax, called the notum, imaged by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) taken by Emmanuel Derivery in the LMB’s Cell Biology Division. In normal conditions (right-hand side), the notum is covered with hair, which are mechanosensory organs, and constitute a well-established system to study cell fate determination following asymmetric cell division. When the mechanisms of cell fate determination are compromised, for instance in mutant conditions (left-hand side), these hairs disappear. Such genetic studies are thus helpful to further our understanding of the molecular mechanisms of asymmetric cell fate determination during stem cell division
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
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