Raising an embryo outside of the egg!?

[bwhite28]

I'm a student at Penn State and we just completed a chick embryo dissection lab. We cracked open eggs that were incubated for 3 days and looked at the effects of temperature on their development. The eggs were cracked open into a dish with about 2 inches of saline solution. You could see the embryo at the top of yolk and you could see the heart beating. Several of the chick embryos survived all day. Have you ever heard of anyone incubating an egg outside of the shell? If so, do you know how they did it??

 

[Higins00]

I saw this done on youtube but I don't know if it was real or not. It looked real and it show the different stages of developement.

 

[Laurieks]

I'm curious about the temp effects... how high & how low & what happened? (if you're allowed to tell us yet)
I've read that 45 centigrade for x hours will kill off some pathogens (ie mycoplasma G&S) & only cut fertility by about 10%. I just don't know how many hours & if it really works.
Thanks for posting

Laurie

 

[Akane]

You can incubate an egg in just about anything for awhile. Very very low odds it will make it anywhere near hatch day though. Between humidity, turning issues, and contamination it's just not going to happen outside of proper laboratory conditions. Even then when they study them through the full incubation period in a lab I believe they replace part of the egg shell rather than remove the contents from the shell. If you want to watch it grow for a few days or weeks though you can carefully empty the contents of an egg in to any plastic or styrofoam container that will fit in your incubator.

 

[Higins00]

copy and paste this see if it works it says civciv - chick

 

[piccolini]

I saw this done at the exploritorium in sacramento ca. It was really neat being able to completely see the developement. Im not sure that any actually were completely incubated to hatching time or if they were that they would survive.

 

[bwhite28]

was this the youtube video you saw Higins00? Those are just snap shots of different eggs that were cracked at different stages of development. You can see in one of the still frames that the yolk is ruptured and then in the next its not. If the yolk is rupture the embryo definitely won't survive because they need that for nutrients.

Laurie- We looked at a couple eggs that were below 37C and then above for the same amount of time and we just compared the differences in development ( this was a lab for a course, not actual research type stuff). I know you can have the temperature fairly low and the embryo will still develop just very slowly compared to 99.5F. 45C seems pretty high, I don't know much about whether or not this would kill pathogens without harming the hatch rate. I know you wouldn't want to expose them to that temp for very long. I may have to do a little research and talking to my professors on that one. I'll let you know if I find anything!

-By the way we also separated the embryo from the yolk and placed caffeine on it to see the effects of caffeine on heart rate. It was pretty neat. If you ever get a chance do something like this DO IT!