Two to three weeks after conception, an embryo faces a critical point in its development. In the stage known as gastrulation, the transformation of embryonic cells into specialized cells begins. This ...

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 ...

For several years, researchers studied human embryonic stem cells (ESCs) to understand the unique features of these pluripotent cells, but on their own, they poorly resembled the complex structures ...

What do the earliest stages of a pregnancy look like? Embryonic development has been extensively studied, but most of our knowledge of the earliest stages of a growing baby come from stationary ...

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 — ...

When Berna Sozen, PhD, assistant professor of Developmental Stem Cell Biology at Yale, was in her first weeks of pregnancy, she couldn’t help but wonder about what exactly was going on in the “black ...

The earliest days after fertilization, once a sperm cell meets an egg, are shrouded in scientific mystery. The process of how a humble single cell becomes an organism fascinates scientists across ...

Using CRISPR-based engineering methods to prompt stem cells to organize into embryo-like structures, scientists were able to create 'programmable' cellular models of embryos without ever experimenting ...

Scientists are exploring ways to mimic the origins of human life without two fundamental components: sperm and egg. They are coaxing clusters of stem cells – programmable cells that can transform into ...

The team observed the emergence of the three-dimensional embryo-like structures under a microscope in the lab. These started producing blood (seen here in red) after around two weeks of development - ...