Topic
The study of how organisms grow from a fertilised egg into a body, including cell lineages, early embryo formation, tissue mechanics and body-plan patterning.
Whitehead Institute researchers saw engineered epithelial sheets gain a shared orientation once the cells migrated together, according to a PNAS paper. The experiments used cultured cells, so they show migration can supply the cue and leave open whether embryos use it.
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MIT researchers trained a neural network on six signaling pathways in human stem cells, then tested it on mouse embryo cells. Each pathway's gene-activity fingerprint held across cell types, the team reports in Nature Methods.
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Mouse embryo models grown ex utero from induced stem cells alone reached a stage resembling embryonic day 8.5, a Nature paper reports. The culture needs no natural embryos to start, but the models are judged by how closely they match natural embryos.
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Sanger Institute researchers sequenced 45 samples from one pair of twins and found that a rare sarcoma began in one sister and spread to the other before birth. The same genomes hint at a different way for identical twins to form, though this is one pregnancy.
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Jonathan Weissman's lab at the Whitehead Institute traced the lineage of over a million cells in developing mouse embryos using a DNA recorder. The lineage is read after the fact from embryos collected at several stages, so the movie is stitched together from many animals.
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Researchers at the University of Washington and Dartmouth rebuilt a mouse embryo's cell lineage tree across 13.5 days of development using DNA Typewriter. The full analysis rests on a single embryo, which makes the tree a demonstration of the method and one observation of mouse development.
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Teams led by HHMI's Jonathan Weissman and Jay Shendure reconstructed family trees spanning millions of cells in developing mice, reported in Science. Each lab had the cells record their own divisions in DNA, a first step toward mapping a mammal the way the roundworm was mapped.
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Veiled chameleon embryos form the pre-gastrulation cavity once thought unique to mammals, a Nature Communications study reports. The team proposes the lizard as a model for the earliest human stages, a period scientists rarely get to observe directly.
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Researchers led by the Canadian Museum of Nature scored coil direction in photographs of more than 900 embryos and then found the tether on a CT scan, which points to mechanics rather than a developmental program.
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