Teamwork Works

When it comes to building a living organism, teamwork is key. Many different molecules have to work together to make sure that the right parts grow in the right place at the right time. In the case of developing fruit flies (Drosophila), some of these components are pre-packaged in the egg ready to spring into action once it's fertilised. Some of them play a particularly important role in setting up the basic pattern of the embryo, with the head at one end and the tail at the other. These images show Drosophila egg chambers stained with fluorescent dyes that highlight various molecules involved in early embryo development. By figuring out where each molecule appears (green or red) and where they overlap (yellow), researchers can start to understand how they get located in the right place in the egg and tease out how they interact together to make an embryo.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

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Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image adapted from work by Annabelle Dold, Hong Han and Niankun Liu, and colleagues
• RNA Epigenetics, Institute of Molecular Biology, Mainz, Germany and Department of Biology, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Genetics, January 2020