Learn · The Atlas
A teaching library of real embryology, built by the people who see it daily.
Photographs of oocytes, embryos and sperm at every stage — contributed by embryologists around the world, credited to them by name, and free for anyone to learn from.
Why it exists
Every lab has these pictures. Almost none of them are shared.
Embryology is learned by looking. Yet the images that teach it sit on hard drives in individual labs, and the few public collections are small, closed, or behind a society membership. A trainee in a two-incubator unit may never see a good 5AA, an SER cluster, or what real multinucleation looks like — until the day it matters.
The atlas is the obvious fix: pool what already exists, label it honestly, credit the people who contributed it, and give it away.
What we need
Send us these.
The gaps, not the greatest hits. If you have a stage below that we don't yet cover well, yours will be published.
Oocytes
MII with a clear first polar body · MI · GV · and the dysmorphisms: dark or granular cytoplasm, smooth ER clusters, vacuoles, refractile bodies, thick zona, large perivitelline space, fragmented polar body
Fertilisation
normal 2PN with clear nucleoli · 1PN · 3PN · asynchronous pronuclei · failed fertilisation
Cleavage stage
textbook 4-cell and 8-cell · uneven blastomeres · 10–25% and >25% fragmentation · multinucleation · early compaction
Morula
compacting · fully compacted · partial compaction with excluded cells
Blastocyst
every Gardner grade you can get — expansion 1 to 6, and A, B and C for both inner cell mass and trophectoderm · hatching · collapsed and re-expanded
Sperm
normal forms under strict criteria · head, midpiece and tail defects · round cells · debris
Procedures
ICSI at the moment of membrane breakage · biopsy · assisted hatching · vitrification device loaded · post-warming re-expansion
Rarities
giant oocytes, binucleate blastomeres, zona defects, anything that made you call a colleague over to look
How to photograph it
- Whatever you have is fine — a microscope camera, a time-lapse still, or a phone through the eyepiece. Focus matters more than equipment.
- Crop out any overlay text, patient identifiers, clinic logos or system watermarks before uploading.
- Tell us the stage, the day, and the grade you would give it. Add magnification and system if you know them.
- Don't retouch the biology. Cropping, rotation and honest brightness are fine; removing a fragment is not.
How an image is chosen
Six questions, asked of every submission.
Every image is reviewed by a certified clinical embryologist before it appears. This is the checklist used — published here so contributors know exactly what is being judged, and why something might not be selected.
- 01
Is it in focus, and correctly exposed?
Sharp at the plane that matters, no blown highlights, no heavy compression artefacts. A beautiful embryo photographed badly teaches nothing.
- 02
Is the stage unambiguous?
Someone learning should be able to see why it is what it is. Borderline images are welcome, but they must be labelled as borderline.
- 03
Does it teach something a drawing cannot?
Textbook diagrams are already everywhere. We publish photographs because real material is messier and more instructive than an illustration.
- 04
Is the grading defensible?
The contributor's grade is compared with the reviewer's and, in time, with the community's. Where they disagree, we publish the disagreement — that is itself the lesson.
- 05
Is it clean of identifiers?
No patient name, ID, date of birth or clinic name in the frame, in the filename or in the file's metadata. Anything with burned-in text is rejected, however good the image.
- 06
Do we already have three like it?
We would rather have one excellent 4AA than twelve. Gaps beat duplicates — check the list above before sending.
Not selected does not mean not good. Most rejections are duplicates of a stage we already cover, or images with an identifier in the corner. If yours isn't chosen, you'll be told which of the six it was — and you're welcome to send another.
Licence
Images you send are free for Embryologics to use.
By submitting, you give Medical Interventions (Embryologics) a free, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to publish, display, reproduce and adapt your image for education — on embryologics.com, in the atlas, in teaching material, in the academic track, and in talks or courses we run — always with credit to you as you asked to be named.
- You keep ownership. The image remains yours. You can use it anywhere else, including commercially, without asking us.
- We will not sell your image or licence it on to a third party as stock.
- Credit travels with it. Wherever it appears, your name appears — never your clinic's, unless you explicitly ask.
- You can withdraw it. Email contact@embryologics.com and we remove it from the site and from future teaching material.
- You confirm you may share it — that you own it or your lab has authorised you, and that it carries no patient-identifiable information.
In short: send it, keep it, and let the next generation of embryologists learn from it.