Fruit fly embryos have been filmed for the first time. That鈥檚 quite some feat when you consider that living embryos can鈥檛 be seen clearly even under a microscope.
Fruit fly embryos are almost opaque as they are covered with a yolk-like substance. This substance is highly refractive, so it scatters light, making it hard to focus a microscope on the embryos. To overcome this hurdle, and colleagues from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, shone patterns of light at the embryos instead of illuminating them with an even beam.
When the fine structures of an embryo reflects these patterns of light, the pattern changes. The team used computer algorithms to interpret these changes in the pattern, filtering out the 鈥渞ebound鈥� rays, to generate the real image amongst the scattered light. 鈥淭he new technique allows us to record organisms which have so far been poorly studied because of their unfortunate optical properties,鈥� says Stelzer.
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In 2008, the EMBL successfully made a digital 3D animation of zebrafish embryos, but the new images provide much more detail.
