Studies on the Hematopoiesis of Chick Blastoderm Part 2. Observations of erythropoiesis by means of tissue culture

By means of tissue culture of chick blastoderm and taking the microscopic pictures with a 16 mm movie camera, the author studied the behaviors and differentiation of the primitive erythroblasts, the mother cells of erythrocytes in the embryonic stage, and arrived at the following conclusions. The primitive erythroblasts on leaving the blood island at first performs the deformation movent by protruding and retracting actively large, irregular pseudopodia from all sides of the cell body, but with lapse in the culture time the number of protruding and retracting movements decrease and then shortening pseudopodia, finally ceases the movement of cell body completely. At this stage short rod-like mitochondria become slender, and as the cell body become smaller and reticulum grows coarser and nucleoles shrink, it is then transferred to a primitive proerythrocyte. The primitive proerythrocyte actively undergoes mitosis and as mitochondria gradually decrease in number, the cell becomes elliptical, the nucleus grows smaller, the reticulum grows like axle and nucleoles disappear, and it is finally transferred to a primitive erythrocyte.