The following silent time-lapsed black-and-white optical-photomicrographic video clip was created in the laboratory of Dr. Avi Askenazi, Senior Scientist of the Department of Molecular Oncology at Genentech, Inc. (One DNA Way; South San Francisco, CA 94080-4990; Voice: 650-225-1853).
The clip shows A549 Human Lung Carcinoma Cells in culture undergoing apoptosis (Programmed Cell Death) in response to an experimental APO-2L Ligand (a member of the Tumor Necrosis Factor [TNF] ligand family) that activates preexisting membrane receptors. This clip was created on January 13, 1996. For the sake of the presentation, approximately two hours of cellular activity was compressed to somewhat less than 30 seconds.
The extraordinary preprogrammed violence demonstrated in this short video clip cannot be well appreciated by merely reading a description of the events taking place in English. Likewise, examining a single snapshot or even a series of snapshots from the clip would not do it justice. One must replay it several times to begin to comprehend what is going on. The fierce blebbing of pseudopods extending randomly out of the cytoplasm spasmotically during this "dance of death" is sort of like a star undergoing a supernova or a brain undergoing an epileptic seizure. All the cytoplasmic ATP must be consumed by an actin cascade throughout the intracellular skeleton. One can only imagine how the intracellular architecture is being obliterated while the DNA in the nucleus is concurrently being fragmented. As you watch the dynamics of these cells in motion, they will talk to you -- and you will never forget them.
The Proceedings of a Workshop on The Impact of Apoptosis (Programmed Cell Death) for Clinical Laboratory Sciences held in Chicago, Illinois last August can be found on the web at http://www.apoptosis.net.
Note: For ideal viewing (resolution) of the video clip on your platform (whether on a Windows-based PC or on an Apple Macintosh, independently of processor speed), with your particular browser (whether Netscape Navigator 4.5b2 or Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x or 5.0 Beta ), and with your particular modem (whether 14.4, 28.8, 56K, ISDN, or Cable Modem [fractional T1]), it is first recommended that you download and install the latest version of Apple's QuickTime Movie Player (v. 3.0.2). Click here to receive instructions about how to download the QuickTime Movie Player onto your machine.
Click here for our highest-resolution version. {Note: The size of this version is 1.3 MB. A conspicuous change in pixel resolution that occurs briefly about 90 percent of the way through the clip is actually a compression artifact and should be ignored.}
Transfer to Sony Digital Video Tape, Compression to different video streaming formats, and hosting on the GRG website was accomplished with the help of Mr. John Davis, President of Beach Sites, Inc. (310-823-4867; E-mail: webmaster@beachsites.com).