Get Ova It

This prize-winning microscope image shows a pair of female fruit fly ovaries packed full of developing eggs, highlighted using fluorescent dyes. While an insect’s ovaries may seem a long way from our own human organs, they can reveal a lot about the underlying biological principles guiding how cells develop and specialise in other species, including our own. Fruit fly ovaries contain three different types of stem cells, which keep multiplying throughout a lifetime. In fact, researchers have been studying fruit fly ovaries for more than 60 years to figure out how stem cells work and understand what happens when they go wrong. As well as being able to fluorescently mark different ovarian stem cells and track them down the microscope, it’s also relatively simple to do genetic engineering in flies to understand how different genes contribute to maintaining stem cell populations, providing vital insights into infertility and other health conditions.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

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 by Andy Yu Shi Li, winner of the Life Sciences Category, Royal Microscopical Society Scientific Imaging Competition 2021
• Ma Group, Department of Genetics, Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, Henry Wellcome Building of Cancer and Developmental Biology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
• Image copyright held by Andy Yu Shi Li