How does a tiny cluster of cells become an embryo with a head, trunk, and tail? And how do thousands of genes coordinate this development? A new imaging method makes it possible to visualize the ...

Cancers emerge from many different paths. One path begins early, in embryonic development, when a protein complex called PRC2 ...

Multicellularity is one of the most profound phenomena in biology, and relies on the ability of a single cell to reorganize itself into a complex organism. It underpins the diversity in the animal ...

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 ...

Magdalena (Magda) Zernicka-Goetz, today a developmental and stem cell biologist at the University of Cambridge and California Institute of Technology, recalled being an artistic child who enjoyed ...

A collaboration between research groups at the University of California, TU Dresden in Germany and Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s in Los Angeles has identified a mechanism by which embryonic cells ...

A new discovery by researchers challenges our current understanding of gastrulation, the most important stage of early embryonic development. When the zygote, or the fertilised egg, starts to develop, ...

A team of scientists has identified an unexpected embryonic "starting point" for several brown-fat depots: a small cell niche around the dorsal aorta. Using a combination of time-controlled genetic ...

Though more than 8 million babies have been born through in vitro fertilization (IVF), 70% of IVF implantations fail. As IVF is becoming a more common route to pregnancy in cases of infertility, there ...

Some newly reported clumps of cells growing in lab dishes have been hailed as the closest things to human embryos that scientists have ever made in the lab. These entities are human embryo models — ...