Self-similar dynamics of nuclear packing in the early Drosophila embryo (Biophysical Journal)

Embryonic development starts with cleavages, a rapid sequence of reductive divisions, which result in an exponential increase of cell number without changing the overall size of the embryo. In Drosophila, the final four rounds of cleavages occur at the surface of the embryo and give rise to ? 6000 nuclei under a common plasma membrane. We use live imaging to study the dynamics of this process and to characterize the emergent nuclear packing in this system. We show that the characteristic length scale of the internuclear interaction scales with the density, which allows the densifying embryo to sustain the level of structural order at progressively smaller length scales.