In a new medical breakthrough, scientists have successfully grown a synthetic embryo of a mouse without male sperm and a female womb. They used stem cells from mice to recreate the first stage of life and successfully developed an embryo with a brain, beating heart, and vitals for other organs.

The natural process of life was mimicked in the lab without eggs or sperm but with the body’s master cells, which can develop into almost any cell type in the body. The embryo was developed 8 ½ days after fertilization, containing the same structures as a natural one.

The study published in the journal Nature states that their result demonstrates the self-organization ability of embryonic and two types of extra-embryonic stem cells to reconstitute mammalian development. The researchers induced expression of a particular set of genes and established a unique environment for their interactions and got the stem cells to ‘talk’ to each other.

Just yesterday (2022−08−24) Prof. Smolin had a deep brain stimulator inserted into his left Globus Pallidus to help him better manage his symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease. Here he talks about that day, his theory of PD and the journey he had been on to getting DBS.

Eavesdropping on the earliest conversations between tissues in an emerging life could tell us a lot about organ growth, fertility, and disease in general. It could help prevent early miscarriages, or even tell us how to grow whole replacement organs from scratch.

In a monumental leap in stem cell research, an experiment led by researchers from the University of Cambridge in the UK has developed a living model of a mouse embryo complete with fluttering heart tissues and the beginnings of a brain.

The research advances the recent success of a team comprised of some of the same scientists who pushed the limits on mimicking the embryonic development of mice using stem cells that had never seen the inside of a mouse womb.

During mammalian brain development, neural precursor cells first generate neurons and later astrocytes. This cell fate change is a key process generating proper numbers of neurons and astrocytes. Here we discovered that FGF regulates the cell fate switch from neurons to astrocytes in the developing cerebral cortex using mice. FGF is a critical extracellular regulator of the cell fate switch, necessary and sufficient, in the mammalian cerebral cortex.

Neurons and astrocytes are prominent cell types in the cerebral cortex. Neurons are the primary information processing cells in the brain, whereas astrocytes support and modulate their functions. For sound functioning of the brain, it is crucial that proper numbers of neurons and astrocytes are generated during fetal brain development. The brain could not function correctly if only neurons or astrocytes were generated.

During fetal brain development, both neurons and astrocytes are generated from neural stem cells, which give rise to almost all cells in the cerebral cortex (Figure 1). One of the characteristics of this developmental process is that neural stem cells first generate neurons and, after that, start generating astrocytes (Figure 1). The “switch” to change the cell differentiation fate of neural stem cells from neurons to astrocytes has attracted much attention, since the cell fate switch is key to the generation of proper numbers of neurons and astrocytes. However, it remained largely unknown.