Fig. 3

Morphology of testis cells in short-term cell culture. a Morphology of floating cells 12 h after seeding. b Some somatic cells settled to the bottom of the plate within 24 h of incubation. c These somatic cells extended cytoplasmic projections toward one another. c–f Cells presumed to be gonocytes are seen attached to somatic cells (black arrows). The same gonocytes are also shown at a higher magnification (insets). d Gonocytes appeared as singles (black arrow), pairs (yellow arrow), or small colonies (red arrow). e Spindle-shaped fibroblast-like cells were more prominent when confluency reached >70%. Only a small number of gonocyte colonies were observed by Day 7 when routine medium changing regimen was applied. f Increased number of gonocyte colonies were observed when the medium was not changed for 7 d. Scale bar, 50 μm