Fuse Breaker

Building block towers and birthday cakes is a messy joy of early parenthood, but the first collaboration with mum-to-be actually takes place during the embryo’s first few days – and it’s incredibly precise. Mother and embryo build an organ together. The placenta is a sort of filter through which food molecules are passed from mother to the developing foetus. Building a placenta requires cells called trophoblasts, which line the embryo, to fuse together into a continuous layer called the syncytiotrophoblast. While the trophoblasts in mouse placenta above (artificially highlighted in green and red) have formed properly, (overlapping to appear yellow), the disrupted cells below give clues to how fusion together happens. They lack a protein called Piezo1 – which responds to mechanical forces between cells, triggering them to fuse. With these insights, researchers hope to take a step towards new treatments for problems during early human pregnancies.

Written by John Ankers

John Ankers

Writer

A former researcher in systems biology, John is now an online biology tutor and professional coach supporting the wellbeing of scientists and NHS professionals. He's writing, too, of course.

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• Image from work by Yang Zhang, Ke Z. Shan & Pengfei Liang, and colleagues
• Department of Biochemistry, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, July 2025