Hidden Eggs

People describe laptops as ‘black boxes’, with their concealed inner workings hard to understand and impossible to repair. The body is not much different. Our understanding of some essential parts and processes is limited by how hard they are to access and observe. To better understand ovaries, where eggs are formed, researchers have generated artificial replicas in the lab from mouse stem cells – starter cells that can develop into other types such as key ovary components germ cells, which go on to form eggs, and granulosa cells, which support those eggs. Generating granulosa cells from human material has proven harder, but this picture shows the results of a successful attempt (granulosa-like cells in green). With the generated germ and granulosa cells alongside each other, ovary structures began to form, which will provide an easily-accessed testing ground and give a glimpse inside the black box, revealing more secrets of fertility.

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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• Image from work by Merrick D Pierson Smela and Christian C Kramme, and colleagues
• Wyss Institute, Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, February 2023