Early Restart

They say that once you learn to ride a bike, you never forget. It seems there are certain unforgettable skills for our cells too. Stem cells – starter cells in an embryo that specialise into other cell types – maintain their ability to form the basic structure of an embryo even when they’re removed and replanted elsewhere. A new study harnesses this to develop embryo-like forms which can be used to probe fundamental questions of human development. Experiments with human embryos themselves are limited by short supply and strict ethical restrictions, so being able to mass-produce structures (pictured) that mimic their morphology allows researchers to interrogate early development with experiments that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Although the reconstructions differ in various ways from embryos, the similarities open many doors for investigation, which could ultimately unearth new information about devastating conditions that take hold in the earliest stages of life.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Berna Sozen and Victoria Jorgensen, and colleagues
• Plasticity and Self-Organization Group, Division of Biology and Biological Engineering, Caltech, Pasadena, CA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, September 2021