Adult cells can only give rise to the same cell type. For example, a skin cell cannot give rise to a muscle cell but to skin cells only. This limits the potential use of adult cells for therapy.

Mouse embryonic stem cells (ESCs) have emerged as ideal tools for developmental biology research due to their characteristics such as unlimited proliferation and pluripotent differentiation potential.

Mammalian eggs and sperm are highly specialized, differentiated cells, but when they fuse at fertilization the resulting zygote is able to give rise to an entire individual and its extraembryonic ...

Early mammalian development is a highly complex process involving elaborate and highly coordinated biological processes. One such process is zygotic genome activation (ZGA) which occurs following the ...

The embryo was no bigger than a grain of sand. Under the microscope, it had divided just twice; four cells arranged in a tidy cluster, each carrying instructions for a different piece of the animal it ...

Early mammalian development is a highly complex process involving elaborate and highly coordinated biological processes. One such process is zygotic genome activation (ZGA) which occurs following the ...

Using a newly developed method, researchers have been able to shed light on the complexity of genome reorganization occurring during the first hours after fertilization in the single-cell mammalian ...

Scientists have found a way to induce totipotency in embryonic cells that have already matured into pluripotency. This has great potential to improve cell engineering capabilities for regenerative ...

Totipotency is the ability of a single cell to form an entire embryo, including extraembryonic tissues, an ability we have yet to recapitalize, in vitro. In a recent paper published in Science, Choi ...

For quite some time, scientists have ascribed Oct4 an important role in early embryonic development—after all, the protein is present in the egg cell. To study the role of Oct4 in the transition from ...

Within the human genome, large stretches of DNA have an unknown function and are referred to as genomic ‘dark matter’. One type of dark matter consists of satellite DNAs, which are short units of DNA ...

Early mammalian development is a highly complex process involving elaborate and highly coordinated biological processes. One such process is zygotic genome activation (ZGA) which occurs following the ...