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1/4: Excited to share my #preprint on microsporidia polar tube (PT) infection apparatus. We show how a 100-um long PT is packed inside a tiny spore and use live-cell imaging to study PT firing and cargo transport. #microsporidia #parasites #microscopy https://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.04.03.024240v1
2/4: We used serial block-face SEM to reconstruct the PT in 3D and other organelles in the spores. The tube is packaged as a tilted coil inside the spore with the length twice shorter than when it is extruded.
3/4: We performed live-cell imaging of the PT germination in vitro from 3 different species. The PT fired extremely fast, ~800 ms with velocity approaching almost 300 um/s!
4/4: We tracked the nucleus as a marker of infectious cargo and show that nucleus undergoes extreme deformation to fit into the PT, which is 7-times smaller than the cargo size.
