• Question: what do you do once you have extracted the embryo cell?

    Asked by charlotteg to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 13 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Aoife O'Shaughnessy-Kirwan

      Aoife O'Shaughnessy-Kirwan answered on 13 Nov 2013:

      Hi charlotteg, sometimes we analyse it (by looking at what genes it has switched on) but most of the time we put the cells into flasks and turn them into an embryonic stem cell line that we can use indefinitely and carry out experiments on
      Aoife

    • Photo: Anzy Miller

      Anzy Miller answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      As Aoife has said, most of the time we extract the embryo cells in order to make cells that continue to grow in the lab forever. So we grow it in conditions that it likes and so it grow and divides and keeps going and going until you have loads of cells to work with! And they will all be genetically the same (have the same DNA) so you can investigate whatever you want on any of the cells at any time 🙂

    • Photo: David Christensen

      David Christensen answered on 18 Nov 2013:

      I just want to make a brief comment in case you have misunderstood something. An embryo is a ball made up of lots of cells. To make embryonic stem cells we extract a bunch of cells from the centre of the embryo that are different to the cells that grow around the outside of the embryo. These extracted cells are then grown up in a lab and are then called embryonic stem cells. Because these cells can keep on replicating forever, we do not have to extract cells from embryos often and in fact I have never extracted any cells from an embryo. The embryonic stem cells that I work with were extracted from embryos more than 10 years ago! I have been able to keep growing these cells and do lots of experiments with them. My experiments are looking at how these cells use sugar and also how they grow in different amounts of oxygen. I hope this helps answer your question!

Comments