Biology is exciting and informative, giving us insight into the beauty of life. What we see with the microscope is the amazing developmental process by which form emerges out of unformed material. To watch an embryo develop is to see the life of a new individual emerge, gradually, stage by stage, from very simple material […]
Tag: embryos
Last year I published a snapshot of a mitotic wave in a fruit fly embryo. Here’s the video of that same embryo going through cleavage (nuclei divisions) and gastrulation (cell movements): Mitotic waves What you see at the beginning of the movie are the cycles of synchronous nuclei divisions. They happen in waves from the […]
Every time I open Spotify, I see the pattern of engrailed expression in an early Platynereis larva. Once you see it, there is no turning back! Reference Prud’homme, B., de Rosa, R., Arendt, D., Julien, J.-F., Pajaziti, R., Dorresteijn, A. W. C., Adoutte, A., Wittbrodt, J., & Balavoine, G. (2003). Arthropod-like expression patterns of engrailed […]
A mitotic wave traveling through an early #Drosophila #embryo #FlyFriday
When I film embryos under the microscope, some will be younger and some will be older than others—they are never in perfect synchrony. This is fine when watching the recordings of individual embryos, but becomes an issue when you want to watch two (or more) embryos developing side-by-side. In my case, I want to identify […]
This is a bryozoan embryo exhibiting its blastopore. These animals are discreet but ubiquitous in oceans and lakes all over the world. What we see is the DNA inside the nucleus of the cells of the embryo. The color gradient indicates if the nuclei are closer (yellow) or further away (purple) from the microscope camera. […]
A short video that I made about the embryonic development of the likeable Drosophila, also known as fruit fly or vinegar fly, won an honorable mention in the Small World in Motion. The details on the techniques I used and the video on its full resolution are available for download and re-use on the Wikimedia […]
Video summary about our work on bryozoan development and the evolution of cleavage patterns published in BMC Biology!
The first 24 hours in 1.5 minutes of bryozoan embryos.