Order emerges from cellular tumult in this video of a developing fruit fly embryo imaged with unprecedented cell-by-cell three-dimensional detail.

The technique, called simultaneous multiview light-sheet microscopy, illuminates a biological sample with thin sheets of light positioned at the focal planes of multiple high-resolution digital cameras. Together they collect 175 million voxels–the 3-D version of pixels–of information per second. The photographs are then combined and assembled to create a 3-D image.

An advantage of the technique, which is described June 3 in Nature Methods by two research teams that developed similar methods independently, is the ability to view in high resolution entire living systems rather than isolated pieces.

“The practical approach in biological live imaging has been to reduce the observation of large systems to small functional subunits and to study these one at a time,” wrote one of the teams, which was led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute cell biologist Philipp Keller.

Studying subunits is important, but, just as it’s hard to hear a symphony by playing the scores of individual instruments, a subunit focus is limited when applied to complex processes like embryo development.

“A whole-embryo view of morphogenesis with subcellular resolution is essential to unravel the interconnected dynamics at the varying scales of development,” wrote the other team, which was led by developmental biologist Lars Hufnagel of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.

In the video and image above, cell nuclei have been tagged with proteins that glow under fluorescent light. The video was assembled from 1 million sequential photographs taken over 20 hours of an embryo’s growth and rearrangement.

Video: Twenty hours of a fruit fly embryo’s development. (Keller et al./Nature Methods)

Citations: “Quantitative high-speed imaging of entire developing embryos with simultaneous multiview light-sheet microscopy.” By Raju Tomer, Khaled Khairy, Fernando Amat & Philipp J. Keller. Nature Methods, June 3, 2012.

“Multiview light-sheet microscope for rapid in toto imaging.” By Uros Krzic, Stefan Gunther, Timothy E Saunders. Nature Methods, June 3, 2012.