Using quail to study development

Professor Rusty Lansford describes how researchers examine avian systems by opening an egg and dynamically imaging developmental events under a microscope.

It’s important for us to know how cells and the organism develop because it gives a slight glimpse into how we develop. So we are using quail as a model system, in a sense, to see how we develop. Not many humans would let us look inside and see how the babies are developing inside the mom. By doing this with the quail system we can literally just open up the top of an egg and put it under a microscope and dynamically image the events that are going on. So those early events that you could never see, be it for normal development or for disease states, we can basically get a glimpse inside at cellular resolution. By cellular resolution, I mean 1–6 micron resolution so we are seeing where every individual cell is moving and how the whole tissue is forming.