Ovarian Splendor

What am I looking at?

This is an image of a fluorescently labeled fruit fly ovary, composed of multiple ovariole strands, each containing multiple developing egg chambers. The eggs are dark blue/purple (1), and the nuclei of the nurse cells are red, green, and yellow (2).

Biology in the background

Fruit flies are a common household annoyance, but they are also extremely valuable in biological research. They have a surprising number of genes in common with humans, with about 60% of our genome and theirs being identical. They breed quickly, and scientists have developed many genetic tools to study them. This allows researchers to test hypotheses using a wide variety of techniques over a relatively short period of time, conferring an advantage over other model organisms.

As you can see, the size of these eggs varies; the largest – the mature eggs in the middle of the image – are about 500 micrometers long, or roughly seven times larger than the width of a human hair.

Technique

This image was created using confocal microscopy.