Two to three weeks after conception, an embryo faces a critical point in its development. In the stage known as gastrulation, the transformation of embryonic cells into specialized cells begins. This ...

For several years, researchers studied human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) to understand the unique features of these pluripotent cells, but on their own, they poorly resembled the complex structures ...

What do the earliest stages of a pregnancy look like? Embryonic development has been extensively studied, but most of our knowledge of the earliest stages of a growing baby come from stationary ...

Researchers have gained new insights into the mechanism behind the spatial organization of DNA within the cells of early embryos. When an embryo is first formed after fertilization, each cell has the ...

Magdalena (Magda) Zernicka-Goetz, today a developmental and stem cell biologist at the University of Cambridge and California Institute of Technology, recalled being an artistic child who enjoyed ...

The earliest days after fertilization, once a sperm cell meets an egg, are shrouded in scientific mystery. The process of how a humble single cell becomes an organism fascinates scientists across ...

A recent Nature study evaluates post-implantation development in humans using embryo-like models based on genetically unmodified human naïve embryonic stem cells (ESCs). Study: Complete human day 14 ...

When Berna Sozen, PhD, assistant professor of Developmental Stem Cell Biology at Yale, was in her first weeks of pregnancy, she couldn’t help but wonder about what exactly was going on in the “black ...

In the earliest hours after fertilization, an embryo takes its first steps toward becoming a living organism by shedding maternal control and activating its own genetic program. This critical process, ...

Scientists are exploring ways to mimic the origins of human life without two fundamental components: sperm and egg. They are coaxing clusters of stem cells – programmable cells that can transform into ...