What tools are available to educators and students?

No microscope? No problem! The Allen Institute for Cell Science has four different interactive tools that allow you and your students to explore thousands of images of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) in a variety of ways.

Click here for a quick guide for how to use the tools or browse through the list below:

Cell Feature Explorer

Audience: high school level and up

Overview: Are you and your students curious about how the structures of cells change over their life cycle? Use the Cell Feature Explorer to view 3D images of hundreds of thousands of individual human cells and use our interactive plot to explore the relationship between different properties of the cell (cellular volume, stage of mitosis, etc.).

Visual Guide to Human Cells

Audience: high school level and up

Overview: Want to learn about the different organelles found in an animal cell? This interactive resource displays major cell structures and describes their functions in an annotated model of a real human cell. The cell contains 14 structures that were derived from our microscopy image data. The annotated cell model is accompanied by microscope images and videos, illustrations and written explanations describing each structure’s anatomy and function, as well as an additional 84 3D models that display each structure undergoing each stage of mitosis.

Integrated Mitotic Stem Cell

Audience: high school level and up

Overview: Want to learn about the stages of the cell cycle? This visual essay introduces an advanced data-driven model and visualization tool that captures human cell division by integrating 3D data from 75 single-cell images. The model and the visualizations in the essay follow 15 cell structures through the whole cell cycle.

Cell Structure Observations

Audience: advanced high school level and up

Overview: Curious about what cross sections of stem cells look like? Use our Cell Structure Observations tool to watch videos and see images of several cross sections of human induced pluripotent stem cells that have different structures fluorescently tagged.