Yale School of Medicine researchers have discovered how to measure an infant’s risk of developing autism by looking for abnormalities in his or her placenta at birth.
This allows for earlier diagnosis and treatment for the developmental disorder. The findings are reported in the April 25 online issue of Biological Psychiatry.
Learn more about the discovery on YaleNews →
Illustration: Patrick Lynch
(via molecularlifesciences)
Technicolor Stickleback
This juvenile fish has developing bone stained red and developing cartilage stained blue.
Mark Currey, PLoS Genetics, doi:10.1371/image.pgen.v06.i02.g001
Elephants have the longest gestation period of any mammal, lasting a staggering 22 months. Most mammals have 1 corpus luteum, a temporary endocrine structure that serves to regulate hormone levels during pregnancy. Elephants, on the other hand, can have as many as 11. From Science Mag:
In most mammals, one corpus luteum forms from a single egg follicle in the ovary during each menstrual cycle. The temporary gland produces progesterone, which in turn promotes thickening of the endometrium and, if an egg is fertilized, maintains the correct balance of hormones throughout a pregnancy to ensure that a female’s body remains geared toward supporting her growing baby. If fertilization doesn’t occur, the corpus luteum dies, only to reform during the next reproductive cycle. From dissected animals, scientists have known for more than 50 years that elephant ovaries contain multiple corpora lutea. But they didn’t know how these structures formed or what roles they played in elephant pregnancies. And they’d never studied the corpus lutea in real-time during an elephant’s life or pregnancy.
Researchers have now discovered that these remarkable creatures form, on average, 5 corpora lutea per menstrual cycle: one derived from an egg generating follicle (as was expected) and the rest forming from separate follicles throughout the menstrual cycle. While pregnancy in elephants is still not fully understood, scientists now theorize that by increasing the number of corpus lutea during pregnancy helps maintain hormone levels, allowing for the complex brain of an elephant to fully form during gestation.
Transgenic zebrafish (4 days post-fertilization) expressing a calcium indicator in the central nervous system. Green fluorescence indicates areas of high levels of intracellular calcium.
Chick embryo at 6x magnification, by Tomas Pais de Azevedo of Universidade de Lisboa in Portugal.
Tubes digestifs d’embryons de poulet, caille, poisson zèbre et souris
The digestive tracts of chick E12 (from left), quail E12, zebra finch E13, and mouse E16,5 embryos are shown with the mesenteric tissue still attached. The top row shows the relative size of the eggs (or embryo, in the case of the mammal).
Composite photo courtesy of Natasza Kurpios
source : What’s behind the predictably loopy gut, Harvard Science 2011
Reblogging this because I think it’s just too cool for my new followers to not see!
My unfairly sexy boyfriend is taking developmental biology this semester and sent me this video!
It’s a chick embryo that has been removed from the yolk after an incubation period of 72 hours. You can see the head in the right hand portion of the screen. Below that is a small sac-like organ. That would be the heart, and yes, it is beating.
My unfairly sexy boyfriend is taking developmental biology this semester and sent me this video!
It’s a chick embryo that has been removed from the yolk after an incubation period of 72 hours. You can see the head in the right hand portion of the screen. Below that is a small sac-like organ. That would be the heart, and yes, it is beating.
![the-star-stuff:
And now, a chicken grown in a Petri dish
A fertilized, incubated chicken egg takes about 21 days to hatch; and while most of us have seen what chicks look like at either end of the developmental spectrum (either sunny-side-up in a frying pan or newly hatched in a nature documentary), the fact that egg shells aren’t see-through means that not many people have seen what goes on between days 2 and 20.
Well… now you have.
Having said that, it is possible to grow a chicken in a petri dish. Several methods papers have been published on the subject of Petri-grown chicks, beginning with the Auerbach method in 1974. You can check out the full set of images over on imgur.
[Via reddit]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxqk4r1Buz1qe649zo1_500.jpg)
And now, a chicken grown in a Petri dish
A fertilized, incubated chicken egg takes about 21 days to hatch; and while most of us have seen what chicks look like at either end of the developmental spectrum (either sunny-side-up in a frying pan or newly hatched in a nature documentary), the fact that egg shells aren’t see-through means that not many people have seen what goes on between days 2 and 20.
Well… now you have.
Having said that, it is possible to grow a chicken in a petri dish. Several methods papers have been published on the subject of Petri-grown chicks, beginning with the Auerbach method in 1974. You can check out the full set of images over on imgur.
[Via reddit]
Neurons (in red) extending from cultures of human embryonic stem cells.
Image by Daniel Webber, University of Cambridge.
(via fyeahmedlab)
