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Nicolas Romeo, Jonathan Jackson, Jasmin Imran Alsous (University of Chicago, Chicago, USA; Harvard University, Cambridge, USA; Flatiron Institute, New York, USA)
Vasily Kandinsky once said that “everything starts from a dot”. In our line of work, we say “everything starts from an egg”. Inspired by Kandinsky’s Circle in a Circle, our image depicts the nuclei of the cells that support the egg’s growth in the fruit fly at various sizes and degrees of wrinkling. This BioArt piece is based on our recently published work (Jackson J. & Romeo N. et al. Nature Physics 2023; December issue cover), where we discovered that the nurse cell’s nuclear envelope displays a stereotypic wrinkling behavior as the nuclei quadruple their radius. Using high resolution 3D live imaging and spherical harmonics, we reconstructed the morphology of these nuclei at various stages of the egg chamber’s development. Through mathematical modeling and experimental perturbations, we found that the microtubule-mediated fluctuations in the cytoplasm play a key role in the formation and dynamics of these wrinkles, which become more pronounced the larger the nucleus. Kandinsky’s circles of various sizes correspond to our nuclei at various degrees of wrinkling, while his lines correspond to our microtubules, the size and number of which reflect the degree of cytoplasmic turbulence