The stem cells tasked with creating and maintaining biological tissues have a difficult job. They have to precisely divide to form new specialized cells, which are destined to different fates even though they contain identical DNA. An obvious question then is: How do the cells divide in all the right ways to produce a healthy tissue? This was the grand motivating question for Andrew Muroyama, a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of Stanford University biologist Dominique Bergmann, as he monitored days of leaf development in the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana. There, amongst a thousand cells under his microscope, he noticed that the nucleus—the DNA-containing control center in the cell—moved in unexpected and strangely purposeful ways as stem cells divided.
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Source: Phys.org