Alternative promoters can initiate transcription from different exons

We find that such device crowding is greatly delayed in ALCATRAS 2, the device with more widely spaced traps. There is also an increase in cell retention. This device therefore performs Tetrodotoxin citrate better in long time-lapse experiments, and, after 60 hours, clogging has only become a problem in 25% of the fields of view. Defining a clog as a group of 50 or more touching cells, the mean running time before the appearance of one clog is 24.6 hours, the earliest appearance of a clog was after 12.3 hours and one experiment was run for 58 hours without any clogs. To demonstrate the advantages of the device for studying ageing, we monitored the reduction in cell viability as a function of replicative age, a commonly used measure of lifespan. Using a wild-type strain, we grew cells in 2% glucose in XY media, imaged cells for over 62 hours in the device, and then manually scored the viability as a function of replicative age. In a single device, we measured the replicative lifespans of over 400 cells. The life span curve shows strong agreement with those obtained using either other microfluidic systems or conventional micro-dissection with a mean replicative lifespan of 24.7 divisions using the Kaplan-Meier estimator. Further, we have recorded the level of the heat-shock protein Hsp104p-GFP, a marker for protein damage, as a function of age. In a single experiment, we acquired images from over 1,000 cells at 10-minute intervals and over a 50-hour period. Only cells that were present during the first hour of the experiment and that remained in a trap for at least 10 hours were analysed. This result represents nearly an order of magnitude increase in cell numbers over reports using other devices in which daughter cells are also removed. With the 100s of cells that we tracked in this experiment, we can observe the de-synchronization of cell cycles from one cell to another and a wide distribution of cell cycle times in the population, as previously noted. Further, our data are consistent with ageing affecting the cell cycle: after 5 divisions, the distribution of cell NQ 301 division times is statistically different from the distribution of division times for the first division. The normal growth that we observe in the device indicates that cells either do not experience significant stress or respond to a stressful environment in ways that allow division at typical rates. To distinguish between these possibilities, we have observed localization of GFP fused to the general stress marker Msn2p, which migrates to the nucleus in response to many different stresses.

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