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 ...

By engineering a system replicating the womb lining with high biological accuracy, researchers at the Babraham Institute and ...

Despite being an essential developmental process, the understanding of human embryonic genome activation is limited, owing to the lack of in vitro cell models and ethical concerns. To advance ...

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 ...

Embryonic development is a meticulously orchestrated process in which spatial and temporal cues guide cell fate determination and tissue patterning. Central to this process is morphogen signalling – a ...

A new study from the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS) in London, UK reveals how ancient viral DNA once written off as ...

Transposable elements are stretches of DNA that can move around the genome. Many of these DNA sequences originate from long ...

Researchers have used naïve pluripotent stem cells to create an embryo model that looks and acts like a natural human embryo. They say it’s an ethical way of gaining a better understanding of ...

Under the microscope, MSK scientists studied how cells in a mouse embryo (green) move out and break away from their original tissue by contracting their surfaces (red). Studying this process, known as ...

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 ...

Chromosphaera perkinsii is a single-celled species discovered in 2017 in marine sediments around Hawaii. The first signs of its presence on Earth have been dated at over a billion years, well before ...