NEWS FEATURE
31 August 2021

What’s next for lab-grown human embryos?

Researchers are now permitted to grow human embryos in the lab for longer than 14 days. Here’s what they could learn.

Kendall Powell⁰

Kendall Powell
1. Kendall Powell is a freelance writer in Boulder, Colorado.
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Day 12 human embryo cultured and stained to reveal the Epiblast OCT4 (magenta), the Hypoblast GATA6 (Cyan) and F-Actin (yellow). — A human embryo grown in the laboratory for 12 days, showing cells that will form the embryo itself (magenta). Credit: Antonia Weberling, Bailey Weatherbee, Carlos Gantner and Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz

It was day 13 in a set of experiments in Ali Brivanlou’s laboratory and he had an agonizing task ahead. His team of developmental biologists had thawed dozens of human embryos, placed them into individual culture dishes and watched them grow through the earliest stages of development — something that only a handful of researchers worldwide had ever seen. But he knew that it had to end.

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Nature 597, 22-24 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02343-7

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