“Visualizing Cell Behavior in 3D: a tour of biology research praxis”
Cells serve as unending sources of biological knowledge for the scientific community, but their behaviors remain poorly understood in many contexts. This is especially so for tissues – collectives of cells – which undergo movement and deformations during normal physiological processes as well as in disease states, such as cancer. To investigate both collective and individual cell motility behaviors, my doctoral work requires imaging cell collectives over long timescales. As such, my work relies heavily on my ability to faithfully produce and interpret images of cell collectives in 3D. This talk will first introduce the technical methodology that I use, and then will explore how acquired images are processed and interpreted to support knowledge claims about motile cell behaviors. Through this tour of data acquisition and interpretation, I aim to provide examples of the formation of a working object of scientific knowledge and the world in which it is found. I focus on the emergence of this world and its inhabitants through different spatial scales, as a collaboration among humans, non-humans, and technology.