300px|thumb|Drosophila [[ovariole: spectrosomes are the red round structures in germline stem cells. The red branched structures in 2-cell and 8-cell cysts are the fusomes. ]] The fusome is a membranous structure found in the developing germ cell cysts of many insect orders. Initial description of the fusome occurred in the 19th century and since then the fusome has been extensively studied in Drosophila melanogaster male and female germline development. This structure has roles in maintaining germline cysts, coordinating the number of mitotic divisions prior to meiosis, and oocyte determinati
300px|thumb|Drosophila [[ovariole: spectrosomes are the red round structures in germline stem cells. The red branched structures in 2-cell and 8-cell cysts are the fusomes. ]] The fusome is a membranous structure found in the developing germ cell cysts of many insect orders. Initial description of the fusome occurred in the 19th century and since then the fusome has been extensively studied in Drosophila melanogaster male and female germline development. This structure has roles in maintaining germline cysts, coordinating the number of mitotic divisions prior to meiosis, and oocyte determination by serving as a structure for intercellular communication.thumb|A wild type D. melanogaster testis showing the fusome (spectrin, green), DNA (DAPI, blue), and germ cells (vasa, red). The fusome connects cells in a cyst and becomes branched as the cyst grows with cell divisions. Image by S. Brantley, used with permission by the author.
== Structure ==
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).