1.

) What characteristics of an Ascaris egg make them important to study in a course on

Comparative Vertebrate Embryology?
Ascaris was important to early embryologists and cytologists such as Theodor Boveri
and Otto zur Strassen in the 1890s, who took advantage of several favorable properties
of the early embryos that are still exploited by present-day researchers. The embryos
are obtainable in large numbers from gravid females; they are transparent, facilitating
observation by light microscopy; they can be stored in their original dormant state and
their development initiated synchronously by high temperature or acid shock; and the
pattern and timing of their embryonic cleavages, like those of most nematodes (q.v.), are
invariant from embryo to embryo, with many cell fates apparently determined as the cells
are born. The species studied most extensively by Boveri, Ascaris megalocephala, has
the additional advantage of having only one large chromosome, which was convenient
for cytological studies. Ascaris also has the peculiarity that there is chromosome
fragmentation and diminution in all of the somatic precursor cells as they separate from
the germ line in the early embryo. Although later work has shown that most of the
discarded DNA does not include coding sequences, this feature allowed Boveri to
demonstrate that cytoplasmic components specific to the germ line were responsible for
maintaining chromosomal integrity in these cells, which supported the view that
nonrandomly segregating cytoplasmic determinants were responsible for dictating early
cell fates.
2.) Give the basic morphological difference between an Ascaris ovum in the two-cell stage
of development and an Ascaris ovum in the fusion stage .What makes the two stages
and confusing for a beginner in Embryology?
3.) How can you easily differentiate a male and female pronucleus?
4.) Under the microscope how can a fertilized and unfertilized starfish egg be differentiated?