i recently read an article about the development of stem cells that resemble, roughly, a 2 week old human embryo at the university of Cambridge.

i found this really interesting as the article discusses how many pregnancies are lost within this initial 2 week period for unknown reasons. the engineering of these stem cells into embryo-like cells is important as it now allows for research into why so many embryos fail at this stage.

this is also really useful for investigating the role of developmental genes as they can be genetically modified, something which is difficult to do with the natural embryo. research involving natural embryos is currently illegal after 14 days of development, since the embryo cannot form a twin within this first stage – which i didn’t know so that’s also pretty interesting to me.

the embryos were engineered by over-expressing a transcription factor with embryonic stem cells, which allowed the cells to self-organise into a 3D structure which resembles the post-implantation embryo containing extra-embryonic tissue and a pluripotent epiblast-like cluster.

an example of research already conducted using these cells was the inhibitory role for SOX17 in the specification of anterior hypoblast-like cells.