[
International Worm Meeting,
2013]
After fertilization, the C. elegans embryo goes through a series of cleavages to give rise to particular cell lineages and to form in turn the whole organism. During the early development of this nematode, the embryo does not grow despite the fact that the genome undergoes duplication before each cell division. In other words, the nuclear volume decreases during this process, which means that there must be sort of rearrangement in the structure and organization of the chromatin in the nucleus. Using C. elegans as a model organism has several advantages in the study of nuclear architecture. The most significant of which is that it develops according to an invariant cell lineage, allowing us to compare nuclear architecture in cells that are rigorously equivalent in terms of history, developmental potential and gene expression profile. In our experiments we performed the direct measurement of nuclear and cytoplasmic volumes and compared the nucleo-cytoplasmic ratio between the individual cells within one embryo during early development. The measurements were performed on 3D images of embryos of the OD95 strain using high-speed, high-resolution confocal spinning disk microscopy. These embryos express mCherry-histone and GFP targeted to the cytoplasmic membrane.