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Slide 19
Bone marrow, unspecified source.
This specimen represents a tissue smear, rather than a section. A drop of bone marrow (which is fluid) is placed on the slide and simply smeared across the surface. Ideally this technique creates a single layer of evenly-spaced cells. In practice, different locations in the smear have different quality. You should look for a place where the cells are neither packed together nor clumped but are more-or-less evenly spaced.
Note the abundance of nucleated cells, representing many different stages in the differentiation of each of the several blood cell types.
Reliably identifying all of these cell types is impractical.
Nevertheless, because RBC production is so extensive, most nucleated cells represent immature RBCs. The final stage of RBC production, during which the nucleus begins to pinch off from the hemoglobin-packed cytoplasm, are quite distinctive.
Additional blood smear specimens:
Comments and questions: dgking@siu.edu
Department of Zoology e-mail: zoology@zoology.siu.edu
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SIUC / College of Science / Zoology / David King / ZOOL 409