As you look at this, millions of cells in your body are undergoing cell division. During this process, a mother cell will produce two daughter cells with exactly the same chromosome content.

In this image, a human cell – monitored by live cell imaging - is experiencing chromosome mis-segregation during cell division. The lagging chromosomes will be unevenly segregated and the daughter cells will have an unbalanced chromosome number, a condition known as “aneuploidy”. Aneuploidy has detrimental effects on the cell and it is a common feature of the vast majority of tumors. Ongoing efforts in the lab are aimed at understanding the consequences of chromosome mis-segregation on cell physiology with the hope to shed light on the impact of aneuploidy on tumorigenesis.

I took this image while I was following cells undergoing cell division. During this experiment I was trying to learn how different perturbations alter the fidelity of chromosome segregation.