Word: blastocyst
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...fertilized egg continues its journey, dividing as it moves through the tube. Finally, after several days, it will have become a blastocyst, a hollow, ball-shaped cluster of fewer than 100 cells. By now, it will have reached the uterus. There the blastocyst embeds itself in the uterine wall, where it begins drawing nourishment from the mother and starts the miracle of differentiation: the rapid transformation of cells into tissue that soon becomes recognizable as heart, brain, muscle, kidneys and all the other components of a living, self-sufficient being...
...assurance that the egg will divide; again the culture medium must be carefully controlled. Some researchers think that the highest rate of success could be achieved if the content of the solution were continually altered as the cells go through stages of division. Finally, when the egg becomes a blastocyst or shortly before, it is ready for implanting. One way this can be done is by picking up the egg, which is still no bigger than the dot at the end of this sentence, with a tiny hollow tube, or pipette, then inserting it through the cervix and into...
...placed them in a laboratory culture medium and exposed them to her husband's sperm. At least one egg was fertilized, and the resulting conceptus began to divide, first into two cells, then four, then eight, and so on. A few days later, the conceptus had reached the blastocyst stage: an aggregate of cells in the form of a hollow sphere. Ordinarily, fertilization and this initial division would take place as the egg traveled through the fallopian tube to the uterus. Thus it was at this point that the laboratory conceptus was introduced into Lesley Brown's womb...