It contained millions of cells but was about the size of a contact lens.
Many algae consist of only one cell, while the largest have millions of cells.
"You activate millions of cells, or thousands at the very least," said Ehud Isacoff, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California, Berkeley.
But the technique described last week has made it possible to study millions of cells at a time under slowed conditions.
Millions of cells were grown in order to ensure that there was an adequate supply for the treatment.
The surface of the skin and the lining of the gut shed hundreds of millions of cells each day, cells that must be replaced by the multiplication of the stem cells that lie beneath the surface.
A tumor, Fidler showed, is made of a heterogeneous mixture of millions of cells, only a fraction of which are equipped to leave the primary tumor, form an exploitative alliance with the "soil" of another organ, and initiate metastasis.
Large numbers of female mussels spawn at the same time, discharging eggs in a continuos stream of masses that contain hundreds thousandss, millions of cells, each of which is potentially capable of becoming an adult mussel.
By isolating slabs of tissue from the brains of sleeping cats and inspecting millions of cells at a time, scientists have discovered what they think may be a key element in the brain's machinery for making long-term memories.
The fish can precisely shift that separation across millions of cells by just billionths of a metre, all in under a second.
However, providing such information for a landscape comprising millions of cells is challenging.
