Blossoming Embryo
Nazanin Ebrahimi, Mahyar Osanlouy, Dane Gerneke, Prof Peter Hunter
Isn’t it beautiful to picture a baby coming to this world like how a flower blossoms? To study and model the development of the heart before birth, we carefully harvest rat embryos at the early days of gestation, through a very challenging experimental procedure. Various imaging techniques are used to capture the structural and functional dynamics of the heart tissue at different biological levels (from cell to whole organism) while ensured the integrity of the whole embryo remained intact.
This 3D microCT image shows a rare moment when the embryo is held within the amniotic sac, hanging from the placenta, resembling a blossom beginning its life.