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Updated: May 3, 2026

Quantitative Approaches for Studying Cellular Structures and Organelle Morphology in Caenorhabditis elegans
Published on: July 5, 2019
Electron tomography of microtubule end-morphologies in C. elegans embryos
Eileen O'Toole1, Thomas Müller-Reichert
1The Boulder Laboratory for 3-D Electron Microscopy of Cells, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA.
Abstract:
In this chapter we describe the preparation of early mitotic C. elegans embryos for the tomographic reconstruction of end-morphologies of spindle microtubules. Early embryos are prepared by high-pressure freezing and freeze-substitution for thin-layer embedding in Epon/Araldite. We further describe data acquisition, tomographic reconstruction, and 3-D modeling of microtubules in serially sectioned mitotic spindles. The presented techniques are applicable to other model systems.

