[Gonocytes in the fetal and early postnatal period (stereologic study)]

The behaviour of gonocytes from the 15th prenatal to the 6th postnatal day was studied in testicles of 32 Wistar rats. Histological and cytological methods were applied. Cytological smears were obtained by the imprint method. It was established that the number of gonocytes per cubic millimeter of the tissue for the postnatal group of rat testicles was seven times smaller in respect to the postnatal group. It was 102,338 +/- 15,903 mm0/mm3 for the prenatal group and 13,783 +/- 2538 mm0/mm3 for the postnatal group. The number of gonocytes in the first investigated prenatal day (the fifteenth day) in comparison with the last postnatal day (the sixth day) was even thirty times smaller (i.e. 157,800 against 4,900 mm0/mm3). This work is the first to give morphologic and quantitative data on gonocytes in cytologic smears.