New Life Awakens

Celebrated by a recent exhibition at its new building in White City, London, the MRC LMS has launched a book and website with over 100 interpretations of the phrase ‘A Picture of Health’ gathered from a broad cross-section of society.

As his Picture of Health, Professor Juanma Vaquerizas, head of the MRC LMS Developmental Epigenomics group, chose this image of a fruit fly embryo. Read why:

“Animals of all kinds must go through zygotic genome activation: After fertilisation the first developmental steps are enabled from the maternally inherited material. Then a switch occurs to full control of the developmental programme which will form a new individual using their own genome. Here this transition is happening in a fruit fly embryo. We can see the majority of nuclei in the embryo undergoing nuclear division (in blue), with a special compartment of cells called pole cells (pink) that will lead to the formation of the germline. It represents fundamental aspects of life, among them evolution – the very same mechanisms that lead to the generation of the enormous cellular complexity of an organism will also lead to mutations that can become fixed in the genome of the species driving their evolution. Zygotic genome activation is an amazing time point in the life of any organism, one that we should marvel at how nature managed to orchestrate it.”

Written by Lindsey Goff

Lindsey Goff

Editor-in-Chief

Formerly immunologist for Cancer Research UK, Lindsey has since moved into the field of scientific publishing. She looks after all BPoD editorial matters.

• Image by Liz Ing-Simmons
• Developmental Epigenomics group, MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences, London, UK
• Image copyright held by Liz Ing-Simmons