Electron microscopic observations on the cytotrophoblast contribution to the syncytium in the human placenta.

The terms syncytium and plasmodium were introduced about 100 years ago (see Studnicka, 1929, for historical details) as names for multinucleated masses of protoplasm found in certain animal tissues. Although often used in the past as approximately synonymous the two terms have gradually come to possess quite distinct meanings. Syncytium is now properly used to designate the situation in which a multinucleate condition is established by the fusion of initially separate cells. Plasmodium, on the other hand, is the term applied to a mass of multinucleate protoplasm that has arisen as the result of repeated nuclear division without consequential partitioning of the associated cytoplasm. When the basic features of the histology of the mammalian placenta were becoming unravelled at the end of the nineteenth century it was realized by a number of investigators (see Kastschenko, 1885; Hubrecht, 1888; and van Beneden, 1888, for discussion) that the trophoblast was in part multinucleate. It was not, however, until the important contribution of Bonnet (1903), which brought order into what had become an exceedingly confusing nomenclature, that the terms plasmodium and syncytium, when applied to the placenta, were used in the stricter senses indicated above. In this paper and more specifically in his Lehrbuch der Entwicklungsgeschichte (1907), Bonnet described as syncytia those basophilic nucleated masses of protoplasm which he considered to be formed by the fusion of originally separate cells; plasmodia, in his opinion, however, are established as a result of repeated nuclear division unaccompanied by corresponding cell division. Different mammalian placentae may show one, or other, or both of the two multinucleate

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