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Review
. 2021 Sep 15;148(18):dev199433.
doi: 10.1242/dev.199433. Epub 2021 Sep 16.

Advances in live imaging early mouse development: exploring the researcher's interdisciplinary toolkit

Matthew J Stower  1 , Shankar Srinivas  1
Affiliations
Review

Advances in live imaging early mouse development: exploring the researcher's interdisciplinary toolkit

Matthew J Stower et al. Development. .

Abstract

Live imaging is an important part of the developmental biologist's armoury of methods. In the case of the mouse embryo, recent advances in several disciplines including embryo culture, microscopy hardware and computational analysis have all contributed to our ability to probe dynamic events during early development. Together, these advances have provided us with a versatile and powerful 'toolkit', enabling us not only to image events during mouse embryogenesis, but also to intervene with them. In this short Spotlight article, we summarise advances and challenges in using live imaging specifically for understanding early mouse embryogenesis.

Keywords: Image analysis; Imaging developmental processes; Microscopy; Mouse embryology.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests The authors declare no competing or financial interests.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1
The researcher’s ‘tool-kit’ with regard to live-imaging. Advances on all these fronts will greatly facilitate the use of live-imaging for investigating mouse embryogenesis.
Fig 2
Fig 2
Quantitative analysis of cell behaviour from multiple embryos requires new ways of considering and displaying complex multi-dimensional image data. In this illustration, three cells with different geometric and behavioural properties have been coloured in the lightsheet image of a pre-gastrulation embryo at left, and cells with quantitatively similar characteristics to them are depicted in the plot at right.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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