The Tapestry of Life
There is an undeniable connection between a pregnant individual and their fetus, an unseen bond that is difficult for anyone who has not experienced it to understand. And here we can see that there is also a physical bond with a fetus that develops in the placenta during pregnancy.
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DownloadThe Tapestry of Life
There is an undeniable connection between a pregnant individual and their fetus, an unseen bond that is difficult for anyone who has not experienced it to understand. And here we can see that there is also a physical bond with a fetus that develops in the placenta during pregnancy.
What am I looking at?
This is a fluorescently labeled sample from a mouse placenta. The red lines are trophoblasts that carry parental blood to the placenta (1). The light blue lines are blood vessels from the fetus (2). The yellow circles are red blood cells (3). The dark blue ovals are the nuclei of the remaining cells in the placenta (4).
Biology in the background
The placenta is where blood from the parent transfers oxygen and nutrients to the blood of the fetus during pregnancy. This image is an incredible representation of this process because it demonstrates the intricate entanglement of the parent’s blood vessels, in the form of trophoblast tissue (1), with the blood vessels of the fetus (2). The proximity of these blood vessels allows for the efficient transfer of essential nutrients and oxygen from the parent’s bloodstream to the fetus’s bloodstream.
Blood vessels in a human placenta can be as small as 0.8 millimeters, or roughly 10 times the width of a human hair. Interestingly, if you laid all the capillaries (the smallest blood vessels) in a human placenta end to end, they would stretch for about 340 miles (about 550 kilometers).
Technique
This image was created using fluorescence microscopy.
Derek Sung, University of Pennsylvania