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Wellcome Image Awards 2017 Placenta Stage
23 March 2017

Placenta Stage

The placenta is a remarkable thing: a brand new organ grown during pregnancy to pass nourishing chemicals to baby. But these new developments can make mum’s immune system suspicious, and it must learn to tolerate, rather than attack. The striking colours of these mouse placentas reveal how the immune system can affect placental development. Coloured stains pick out the same types of cell in each placenta, but differences in the immune genes of the mice change how these cells develop, producing different patterns. All the cells are highlighted in blue, while cells lining blood vessels are red, and developing placental cells are shown in green. A mixture of these produces yellows and purples and reveals, for example, that the top left placenta has fewer blood vessels. Understanding how the immune system reacts to a pregnancy could help to treat complications in placenta development, like preeclampsia, in expectant human mothers.

Written by John Ankers

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BPoD stands for Biomedical Picture of the Day. Managed by the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences until Jul 2023, it is now run independently by a dedicated team of scientists and writers. The website aims to engage everyone, young and old, in the wonders of biology, and its influence on medicine. The ever-growing archive of more than 4000 research images documents over a decade of progress. Explore the collection and see what you discover. Images are kindly provided for inclusion on this website through the generosity of scientists across the globe.

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