One of nature's best kept secrets is the development of the embryo. There is a new window open on the process. They used an innovative bioreactor to nurture their creation for longer than any previous embryo models. There are very impressive similarities at the cellular level between the simulation embryo and the real thing. Stem cell biologists say the right cells arise at the right time.
Biologists may be able to understand what goes wrong in birth defects with the feat reported this week. The leader of the team says he hopes to do the same with human stem cells in the future.
There are embryo mimics made from an assortment of mouse or human stem cells, which are derived from normal embryos and can form all of a body's tissues. The blastocyst is a stage in the embryo's development that implants in the uterus. The embryo hit a wall. The cells don't coalesce into organs.
It has been difficult to keep the ersatz embryos alive for a while. They were able to grow standard mouse embryos outside of the mother's body for a record 11 days. The average mouse is about 20 days pregnant. A key step is placing the embryo in an incubator with a Ferris wheel-like device that rotates the embryo inside bottles of liquid filled with growth factors. The setup makes it possible to control growth conditions.
The embryo came from mouse eggs. To find out if the same procedure would allow stem cells to transform into full-fledged embryos, the team mingled basic mouse ES cells with ES cell lines that had been genetically altered to create tissues outside the embryo. The team shifted the cells from culture plates to bottles on the fifth day.
By the eighth day, the embryo had a beating heart, distinct head and tail ends, a developing brain and spine, and the beginnings of other organs. The researchers were able to find all of the expected cell types in the correct locations by measuring the activity of the genes in more than 40,000 embryoid cells.
Jun Wu, a cell biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, says that the study shows that ES cells alone can create embryolike structures.
The artificial embryos stopped working on the eighth day of development. The researchers hope to overcome this obstacle. Stem cell–derived embryos have an advantage over normal mouse embryos due to the fact that the cells are available in larger numbers and scientists can more easily manipulate them.
Less than 1% of the initial cell aggregations form embryo mimics are failures. The advantage of this technique is that we can make a lot of aggregate in a short period of time.
It is possible to achieve the same feat with human cells. Rivron says that this is an ethical and technical alternative to using embryos.
The approach will be investigated to see if it will work with human stem cells that are derived from adult cells. Cell and tissue release factors play a role in the development of neighbors. Stem cells can be grown into artificial embryos in order to create better cell types that can be used to treat humans. It's more like a body part.
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