Nursed to Strength

In the early stages of our lives, we depend on help from family and carers. But that reliance begins long before we emerge into the world. A network of ‘nurses’ nurture egg cells to their unusually large size while they're still taking shape. These nurse cells pass their life-supporting contents directly into the nascent egg cell ahead of fertilisation. A study in developing fruit fly eggs has examined this transfer, which is crucial to fertility but not fully understood. By imaging the process (pictured, nurse cells bustling at the top), the researchers saw that the initial transfer of cell contents (blue) is driven by physical factors, like air flowing counterintuitively from a small to large balloon in a school physics experiment. Later, coordinated muscle contractions driven by the protein myosin (red) squeeze the last drops through connecting channels. If similarities exist in humans, this could help reveal key details of healthy human development.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Video from work by Jasmin Imran Alsous and colleagues
• Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
• Video copyright held by original authors; image reproduction permitted by PNAS
• Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), March 2021