Right First Time

We all make mistakes in our lives. But making mistakes at the very earliest stages of life, when an embryo is just a few cells, can have a devastating impact. Problems with cell division during these crucial first days can lead to embryo cells ending up with the wrong amount of genetic material (chromosomes), leading to infertility, miscarriage or birth defects. To understand more about what’s going on, researchers have developed a technique to spy on these very early cell divisions in human embryos donated by women undergoing fertility treatment. They’ve discovered that the first cell division, when a fertilised egg splits from one cell into two (shown here), can take several hours to complete and often goes wrong. However, the second division from two cells to four is much more accurate, suggesting that getting the very first cell division right is probably the most crucial moment of our lives.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image from work by Emma Ford and Cerys E. Currie, and colleagues
• Division of Biomedical Sciences, Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in BioRxiv, July 2020 (not peer-reviewed)