In 1999 Tesarik and Greco reported that they could predict the developmental potential of human zygotes from a single static evaluation of their pronuclei. Their evaluation was based on the distribution and number of specific nuclear organelles – the nucleoli. Recent studies in the mouse show that nucleoli play a key role in parental genome restructuring after fertilization and that interfering with this process can have long-range effects on embryo development that lead to developmental failure. These mouse studies support the Tesarik-Greco evaluation as potentially one of the useful selection methods of high quality embryos in human assisted reproductive technologies. In this Opinion we discuss the recent evidence linking nucleoli to parental genome reprogramming and ask whether nucleoli can reflect embryo parameters such as chromosome content or fragmentation of the parental genomes.