In the early 1960s, while analyzing electron micrographs of mosquito oocytes in search of hints about chromosomal structure, Thomas Roth's roving eye became more interested in the cell surface, which was covered with pit structures lined by a cytoplasmic coat of “bristles.” When he showed the find to his graduate advisor, Keith Porter, he noted that such structures had been seen in one or two other cell types but remained a mystery in those early years of EM. Indeed as Roth scoured other images in the lab and the literature, he saw the fuzzy-bordered pits in every cell type, “but nowhere had it been so in-your-face as it was for the oocyte,” he recalls.
Armed with only one brief reference to “concavities” in liver cells (Fawcett, 1955) and a key paper showing, by fluorescence microscopy, that moth oocytes took up yolk protein from the extracellular...
