This eight-day-old mouse embryo model has a beating heart, a yolk sac, a placenta and an emerging blood circulation. They replicate only some aspects of development, but not fully reproduce the cellular architecture and developmental potential of embryos derived after fertilization of eggs by sperm-so-called natural embryos. However, even though these models are a powerful research tool, it is important to understand they are not embryos. Using models like this, we can start to ask why.
The embryos are microscopic, tiny clusters of cells, difficult to locate and observe within the uterus.īut we do know that at this stage of development, things can go awry for example, environmental factors can influence and interfere with development, or cells fail to receive the right signals to fully form the spinal cord, such as in spina bifida. The earliest stages of pregnancy are difficult to study in most animals. What's particularly interesting about the newly published model is its very complex structure not only does it mimic the cell specification and layout of an early-stage body plan-including precursors of heart, blood, brain and other organs-but also the "support" cells like those found in the placenta and other tissues required to establish and maintain a pregnancy. Having models provides a way to better understand what can go wrong, and possibly insights into what we may be able to do about it. This is a crucial stage: in humans, many pregnancies are lost around this stage, and we don't really know why. You could produce a key for your model by having samples of the materials on a separate board and label them.This achievement, published in the journal Cell by a team led by researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, is a very sophisticated model of what happens during early mouse embryo development-in the stage just after implantation. Cardboard, paper, material, thread and wool could all be useful. Or you could become very creative, with, for example, a fried egg for the nucleus, a baking tray for the cell wall, cling film for the membrane, plasticine for the mitochondria and chloroplasts. The actual volumes of liquid would need careful management but this would lead to greater understanding of the structure. You could make a model of a plant cell using transparent plastic box as the cell wall, poly bag with wall paper paste as a membrane and cytoplasm, water filled poly bag inside this for vacuole, ping pong ball or roller ball from deodorant as nucleus, choloroplasts could be green plastic beads. One of the difficult things is to get the scale right with each organelle being the right size in proportion to the rest. Then, what to do with all this information? Then there are the more unusual structures which you can read about in text books…ribosomes, golgi bodies, lysozomes, and lots of membranes and fibres (endoplasmic reticulum, microfibres, centrioles etc). The list of parts includes nucleus (and nucleolus), mitochondria, chloroplasts, cell wall, cell membrane, vacuole. Lets begin with the structure of a cell and the various organelles (small organs) inside.
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