Easier Egg Hunt

For developmental studies, a process called ‘windowing’ provides a sneak peak of a developing embryo. A one-centimetre square of eggshell, along with its underlying shell membranes, is cut open slightly to allow examinations of the embryo at different stages of development. Researchers have spent the last two years developing and working with a biomaterial called polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), using it to develop a shell that mimics the curvature and shape of a real eggshell. And it’s also soft and transparent, allowing an uninterrupted view of the developing embryo. This new self-sufficient system, dubbed ‘egg-on-a-chip’, will allow experiments to take place without a huge need for resources, and the transparency of the shell will allow fluorescent imaging in vivo, giving a much more detailed look at the processes involved in embryonic development.

Written by Katie Panteli

Katie Panteli

Writer

Katie, a Warwick Biomed graduate, works for a science-publishing house in London with some of the world's most respected scientific minds. She's most interested in human biology, anything and everything that makes us tick.

• Video by YiYu Lai and Jing Liu
• Tsinghua University, China
• Copyright held by original author
• Research published in Science China Technological Sciences, January 2015