Image courtesy of Natsu Katayama.
Embryonic Rosettes
Embryologists have long studied
the development of a fertilized
egg into a blastocyst into a fetus,
but one crucial step has always
eluded them: the implantation of
the blastocyst into the mother’s
womb. The blastocyst is the
initial ball of cells that develops
after fertilization, and in the span
of two short days it develops
from a ball into a much more
complex structure, which, thanks
to technological developments,
has now been characterized as a
delicate ‘rosette’.
Image courtesy of Elsevier Inc. and Ivan Bedzhov,
Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz.
SciArt in America December 2014
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