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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2015 Aug 1.
Published in final edited form as: Nat Chem. 2014 Dec 15;7(2):130–139. doi: 10.1038/nchem.2133

Figure 6. The zinc flux during egg activation is regulated by a quantitative loss of cortical zinc compartments.

Figure 6

This schematic diagram summarizes the fluxes in total zinc that are observed during maturation and immediately following fertilization/egg activation. The meiotic cycle in the mammalian egg occurs over a very short period of time that is accompanied by a very large flux in the amount and localization of the inorganic element zinc (black bars).5,6 Through the combined used of our novel zinc probe ZincBY-1 for live cell imaging and a suite of fixed cell imaging technologies (sulfide-zinc fixation, STEM-EDS, Bionanoprobe XFM, XFM tomography), we have estimated that there are 8,000 zinc-enriched cortical vesicles in the egg, each containing ~1 million zinc atoms. These vesicles, containing in total 8 billion zinc atoms, are lost at fertilization during the zinc spark and quantitatively contribute to zinc efflux that is required during the egg-to-embryo transition. This study sets a precedent for how zinc can be quantitatively tracked during key biological processes.