A Million Bon Bons a Minute

Reminiscent of a wrapped piece of candy tied at each end, this image shows the mitotic spindle, a tiny cellular machine made of hundreds of very thin polymers, each 1/1000 the diameter of a strand of hair.

The spindle appears suspended in the center of this cell, the edges of which are filled with a cloud of filaments (blue). The mitotic spindle forms each time a cell pides into two. The spindle polymers attach to the duplicated chromosomes and help move them into the two daughter cells.

In a typical adult human, there are at least 1,000,000 pisions each minute.

Credit: P. Wadsworth, University of Massachusetts Amherst