An osteoclast in three dimensions

Petri P. Lehenkari, Guillaume T. Charras, Stephen A. Nesbitt and Mike A. Horton

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Shockwave Flash 3.0 file (swf001mhu).
This will play continuously but you will need to have the latest version of the Macromedia Shockwave Flash Player on your Netscape 3.0+ (or Internet Explorer 3.0+) browser.
Stop and Play buttons: are at the bottom of the animation, click on them at any time.
Green timeline: shows how far the animation has progressed (it is not possible to slide this across).
Arrows: time points - if you click on these, the animation will play from this point.
If you are using a PC with a right-hand mouse button: click on the animation area and use to 'zoom in and out' and rewind or go back a frame etc.

Movie 1 (HTML version only). An osteoclast in three dimensions. This animation of two human osteoclasts, which were cultured on dentine, was derived from the isosurface image shown in Figure 4c (fig004mhu). The same colours have been used in both Figure 4 and the animation; thus, green represents the vitronectin receptor, red represents F-actin and blue represents the dentine surface. ‘Start’ to ‘b’ shows an enlarged, ‘edge-on’ view of the image. ‘b’ to ‘c’ shows the image being tilted through 45 degrees. ‘c’ to ‘d’ shows the image being rotated anti-clockwise through 370 degrees. ‘d’ to ‘End’ shows the relative intensity of the ‘green signal’ (i.e. the vitronectin receptor) of the image being reduced to reveal the internal distribution of F-actin (which appears red); the size of the image is also reduced. Modern visualisation techniques, such as confocal scanning laser microscopy, as used here, and scanning electron microscopy are the strongest competitors for atomic force microscopy as a pure imaging tool, owing to their relative ease of use, speed, flexibility and ability to integrate with immuno-localisation techniques (swf001mhu).