Spindle assembly on immobilized chromatin micropatterns.

ABSTRACT

We describe a method to assemble meiotic spindles on immobilized micropatterns of chromatin built on a first layer of biotinylated BSA deposited by microcontact printing. Such chromatin patterns routinely produce bipolar spindles with a yield of 60%, and offer the possibility to follow spindle assembly dynamics, from the onset of nucleation to the establishment of a quasi steady state. Hundreds of spindles can be recorded in parallel for different experimental conditions. We also describe the semi-automated image analysis pipeline, which is used to analyze the assembly kinetics of spindle arrays, or the final morphological diversity of the spindles.