Supra-second tracking and live-cell karyotyping reveal principles of mitotic chromosome dynamics.

Stamatov, R., Uzunova, S., Kicheva, Y. et al. Supra-second tracking and live-cell karyotyping reveal principles of mitotic chromosome dynamics. Nat Cell Biol (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41556-025-01637-6  

We are pleased to announce that a project from the Laboratory of Genomic Stability at our institute has been featured in the international journal Nature Cell Biology. Using super-resolution microscopy and neural network processing, the group succeeded in developing the first method for segmentation and tracking of chromosomes in living cells.
It is well-known how chromosomes duplicate and then each daughter cell receives one of the two sister chromatids from each chromosome. However, sometimes this process goes wrong, resulting in so-called translocations—a part of one chromosome breaks off and attaches to another. This is an extremely dangerous event for the cell as it can lead to tumorigenesis—the transformation of the cell into a cancerous one.
The likelihood of such translocations is higher when two chromosomes are close in space. However, until now it was not possible to determine the position of chromosomes in 3D space in live cells, let alone track their movement. This was exactly the motivation to develop a procedure for segmentation and tracking of chromosomes in live cells.
This method provides the opportunity to study virtually all processes associated with chromosome dynamics during mitosis, but at the level of a single chromosome, which was not possible until now. This project was made possible thanks to the support of the National Roadmap for Scientific Infrastructure.