Identification of Transplanted Tissues in Chick Embryos by Marking with Phosphorus-32

Abstract

THE technique of transplantation in early chick blastoderms developed by Waddington^1,2 has hitherto been handicapped by uncertainties in distinguishing host from graft tissues during analysis of the resulting embryo. In Amphibia this difficulty has been resolved by heteroplastic grafting between differently pigmented species^3,4, or by the use of vital stains which could be fixed in the tissues⁵. Not a little of the superiority of amphibian embryos as experimental material is due to these techniques. Analogous methods have failed to give an adequate solution of the difficulty in chick embryology. Conveniently available species (as used by Waddington and Schmidt⁶) are not sufficiently distinct histologically, and vital staining is not apparently always well localized⁷ and its fixation for subsequent examination in paraffin sections, though possible⁸, is not reliable.