Live imaging of primitive endoderm precursors in the mouse blastocyst.

The separation of two populations of cells-primitive endoderm and epiblast-within the inner cell mass (ICM) of the mammalian blastocyst is a crucial event during preimplantation development. However, many aspects of this process are still not very well understood. Recently, the identification of platelet derived growth factor receptor alpha (Pdgfr?) as an early-expressed protein that is also a marker of the later primitive endoderm lineage, together with the availability of the Pdgfra(H2B-GFP) mouse strain (Hamilton et al. Mol Cell Biol 23:4013-4025, 2003), has made in vivo imaging of primitive endoderm formation possible. In this chapter we present two different approaches that can be used to follow the behavior of primitive endoderm cells within the mouse blastocyst in real time.