This simple organism may provide ground-breaking information to help us understand similar processes in many different types of animals.
- Stephanie Höhn
Researchers from the University of Cambridge have captured the first three-dimensional images of a live embryo turning itself inside out. The images, of embryos of a green alga called Volvox, make an ideal test case to understand how a remarkably similar process works in early animal development.
Using fluorescence microscopy to observe the Volvox embryos, the researchers were able to test a mathematical model of morphogenesis – the origin and development of an organism’s structure and form – and understand how the shape of cells drives the process of inversion, when the embryo turns itself from a sphere to a mushroom shape and back again. Their findings are published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
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Image: Adult Volvox spheroid containing multiple embryos
Credit: Stephanie Höhn, Aurelia Honerkamp-Smith and Raymond E. Goldstein
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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