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 ...

Stem-cell models provide evidence that viral DNA sequences that entered the human genome in the past were repurposed to aid early stages of embryonic development. Sherif Khodeer is in the Department ...

Under his microscope, Jun Wu could see several tiny spheres, each less than 1 millimetre wide. They looked just like human embryos: a dark cluster of cells surrounded by a cavity, and then another ...

Using CRISPR-based engineering methods to prompt stem cells to organize into embryo-like structures, scientists were able to create 'programmable' cellular models of embryos without ever experimenting ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The mystery of early embryonic communication is starting to be unraveled thanks to a new stem cell-based model.

Bioengineering researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a soft, thin, stretchable bioelectronic device that can be implanted into a ...

A new study from the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS) in London, UK reveals how ancient viral DNA once written off as "junk" plays a crucial role in the earliest moments of life. The research, ...