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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2012 Jul 15.
Published in final edited form as: ACS Chem Biol. 2011 Apr 28;6(7):716–723. doi: 10.1021/cb200084y

Figure 2. Zinc sparks are polarized and are immediately preceded by intracellular calcium transients.

Figure 2

Shortly following activation, zinc sparks occur around the egg cortex with the exception of a zinc spark-free region (a, 00:21:04, arrowhead). This spark-free region corresponds to the region containing the meiotic spindle, where the second polar body is extruded (a, 01:20:00, arrowhead). Egg activation was confirmed by simultaneously monitoring intracellular calcium oscillations with Calcium Green-1 AM every 4 s (b). Intracellular calcium increases immediately before a zinc spark, as evident when images were collected at a faster acquisition rate of every 100 ms in an independent experiment (c). Time is expressed as hh:mm:ss, wherein 00:00:00 represents the start of image acquisition. In all cases, extracellular zinc was detected with FluoZin-3.