Scientists Create Model of Human Embryo to Study Early Abortion

Varieties

March 20th, 6:13am

Cairo - Hazem Badr

A human embryo is shown in a three-dimensional film on human reproduction at the Corpus museum in Oegstgeest, the Netherlands. AP.

An international team of scientists led by Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, has generated a model of a human embryo from skin cells. This discovery will revolutionize research into the causes of early miscarriage and infertility. During the study, the research team has successfully reprogrammed these skin cells into a 3-dimensional cellular structure that is morphologically and molecularly similar to human blastocysts. These can be used to model the biology of early human embryos in the laboratory. The findings were published on March 17 in the journal Nature. Three days after fertilization, a developing embryo has 6 to 10 cells; by the fifth or sixth day, the fertilized egg becomes a blastocyst, a fast dividing mass of cells. The only mean to study an embryo's early days was using these hard-to-reach human blastocysts. "This technique will allow scientists to study the very early steps in human development and some of the causes of infertility, congenital diseases and the impact of toxins and viruses on early embryos - without the use of human blastocysts and, importantly, at an unprecedented scale, accelerating our understanding and the development of new therapies," said Jose Polo from Monash University's Biomedicine Discovery Institute and the study's senior author in a report published on the university's website. The team used a technique called "nuclear reprogramming" which allowed them to change the cellular identity of human skin cells when placed in a 3D scaffold organized into blastocyst-like structures. The research is published as the International Society for Stem Cell Research is about to release guidelines for research on modeling human embryos in vitro following 2017 and 2018 reports on the generation of mouse "blastoids" in vitro by researchers from the UK and the Netherland. These guidelines are expected at the beginning of this year. It is not known whether the new guidelines will reference the study published today in Nature, which is the first to produce an integrated stem cell model that closely mimics the early human embryo. However, in a paper published in Stem Cell Reports last February (2020), the Society states it's possible to develop models for the early human embryo.

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/2870596/scientists-create-model-human-embryo-study-early-abortion