They create the first synthetic mouse embryos (with a beating heart and brain) through stem cells

Scientists from the University of Cambridge they have created embryos without eggs or sperm but from mouse stem cells. Mimicking natural processes in the laboratory, the team – led by Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz – developed the first embryo model synthetic with a braina beating heart and the foundations of other organs of the body.

Unlike other laboratory embryos, these models managed to whole brain -including the previous part- began to develop, something had never been achieved. This supposes a new way for recreate the early stages of life, a fact that would help to understand why some embryos fail while others thrive in a healthy pregnancy. Furthermore, the results could be used to guide the repair and development of human organs ‘synthetics’ for transplants.

“Our mouse embryo model not only develop a brain, but also a beating heart and all the components that make up the body. It’s amazing that we’ve come this far. This has been the soil of our community for years and the main objective of our work for a decade“, underlines Zernicka-GoetzProfessor of Mammalian Development and Stem Cell Biology, speaking collected by the aforementioned university.

Process for obtaining the first synthetic embryos with a brain

As explained in the aforementioned article, stem cells can become almost any type of cell. Thus, the experts imitated natural processes in the lab by guiding the three types of stem cells involved in early mammalian development to the point where they begin to interact. By inducing the expression of a particular set of genes and creating a unique environment for your interactionsthey managed to make the stem cells “talk” to each other.

This caused the stem cells self-organized in structures that progressed through the successive stages of development to create beating hearts, the foundations of the brain, and the yolk sac, where the embryo develops and obtains nutrients in its first few weeks. Many pregnancies fail at the time the three types of stem cells they begin to send mechanical and chemical signals to each other, to tell the embryo how to develop properly.

For the past decade, the Cambridge group has studied these early stages of pregnancy, hoping to understand why some pregnancies fail and others succeed. “The model of stem cell embryo is important because it gives us structure accessibility developing at a stage that is normally hidden from us due to the implantation of the tiny embryo in the mother’s womb,” explains Zernicka-Goetz.

To guide the development of their laboratory embryo, researchers they pooled cultured stem cells of each of the three tissue types in the proper proportions and environment to promote their growth and communication with each other. They discovered that the extraembryonic cells they send chemical signals to the embryonic cells, but also mechanical ones, or through touch, guiding the development of the embryo.

A major advance of the study, as noted above, is the ability to generate the entire brain, particularly the anterior part, which until now has been one of the main stumbling blocks in the development of synthetic embryos. In the Zernicka-Goetz system this has worked thanks to the signals from one of the extraembryonic tissuesa factor that it needs the forebrain in order to develop.

They study to develop models of similar human embryos

“This opens up new possibilities for study the mechanisms of neurodevelopment in an experimental model,” argues Zernicka-Goetz. Although the current research was done in mouse models, the researchers are developing human models similar with the potential of target the generation of organ types to understand the mechanisms underlying crucial processes that cannot be studied in real embryos.

Currently, UK law only allows human embryos to be studied in the laboratory up to the 14th day of development. If in the future the methods developed by this team work with human stem cells, they could also be used to guide the development of laboratory organs for patients awaiting transplants.