#germ cells

Gathered about MOS

Cell division that results in an egg (and the same for sperm) from the germ cell is called meiosis (different from mitotic division that all other body cells undergo). Here in a mouse study, an enzyme called MOS has been found to be key to normal meiotic cell division. The image shows structures in a normal cell (left) undergoing meiosis – the midbody with a 'ring and cap' highlighted in magenta (DNA in white and tubulin in green) – and in a cell without MOS (right) revealing the midbody's 'cap' is absent

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Gisela Cairo, Muhammad A. Haseeb and colleagues

Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Hanover, NH, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Journal of Cell Science, March 2026

pages 235 and 243 - everything I said before, but maybe there's a worm that has taken over everyone's brain and it makes them good at basketball, or good at coaching basketball, or supporting the local basketball team. Or maybe it just makes you shit yourself bloody and then your brain falls out your ears and you're dead.

Spreading the love: At first, no one believed the researchers. How could marine animals pollinate plants under the surface, like bees do above? It happens—and it has likely been happening for tens of millions of years, biologist Zong-Xin Ren tells Nat Geo. “We know so little about our world,” Ren says. (Pictured above, an isopod covered in the germ cells of red algae.)

Unlocking knowledge one post at a time! Check out our latest notes on www.microscopiaiwm.com – a treasure trove of insights, ideas, and inspiration. Dive in, explore, and let the journey of discovery begin! 📚

                                        INTRODUCTION: Mitosis is a type of cell division that takes place in living organisms and it is commonly defined as the process of duplication of chromosomes in eukaryotic cells and distributed during cell division.  The process where a single cell divides resulting in two identical cells, each resulted cell contains the same number of chromosomes and…

Even if science has all the answers to something, that doesn’t make it any less interesting... or in this case, creepy. “What am I talking about today?” you may be wondering. Well I’m taking a look at something medical, something which happens to people all the time. Something that could grow on you. A tumor.

Conserving Eggs

Defining sexual reproduction are germ cells – cells which, after dividing by meiosis (different from the division by all other body cells, mitosis) and maturation, become either the female's egg cells or the male's sperm. A structure involved in egg-producing meiosis called the fusome was discovered in the fruit fly decades ago, and now a similar structure has been discovered in mice. It's thought that the fusome is part of an ancient conserved process that ultimately leads to uniform egg cell production

Video made using Leica Microsystems microscopy

Read the published research article here

Video from work by Madhulika Pathak and Allan C Spradling

Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Laboratories, Carnegie Institution for Science, DC, USA

Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in eLife, March 2026

Separating an Egg

Oocytes – the female germ cells – divide as they mature. But unlike the rest of our cells, the non-sex cells or somatic cells – they don't have centrosomes (structures within the cell for polarisation of chromosomes) to accurately organise the process, instead they assemble a complex from microtubules prior to division. This study shows the importance of the enzyme MPS1 in preventing errors as oocytes divide

Read the published research article here

Image from work by Shuhei Yoshida and colleagues

Laboratory for Chromosome Segregation, RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research (BDR), Kobe, Japan

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in The EMBO Journal, June 2025