Time lapse photography is a great tool for documenting gastrulation movements. Traditional approaches only allow for a few samples to be visualized at a time and embryos have to be embedded in agarose, which is a tricky and invasive process. Therefore, the Feldman laboratory designed a system to allow for continuous automated documentation of multiple specimens with high throughput and minimal invasiveness. The Feldman group’s solution was to lay spherical embryos onto on an array of negative cones, much like adding a scoop of ice cream on top of an ice cream cone. Here’s a movie of 56 developing embryos that were individually lodged within the cone array. Their development was recorded simultaneously over an eight-and-a-half hour time period using a very high resolution camera. Click here to see a close-up of the three highlighted embryos.

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