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STEM CELLS

Engineered models of the human embryo

Nature Biotechnology volume 39, pages 918–920 (2021)Cite this article

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Embryo models built from stem cells promise to shed light on human development.

The past decade has seen the rise of a new subfield in human developmental biology known as synthetic embryology. Starting from human pluripotent stem cells, researchers have begun to create cell structures that capture specific features or processes of the early embryo, such as the epiblast, trophoblast, amniotic cavity, axis development and gastrulation1. These models do not demonstrate sequential embryonic growth beginning with the zygote but mimic discrete stages of development. The first embryo model generated from stem cells was published in 2014 and captured aspects of early human gastrulation2. In a recent breakthrough, two papers in Nature, by Liu et al.3 and Yu et al.4, reported the first stem cell–based models of the human blastocyst, and several subsequent papers have described similar results5,6,7. The blastocyst-like structures, or blastoids, are already a useful research tool, but their value will ultimately depend on how closely they approximate natural blastocysts.

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Fig. 1: Comparison of early human development in vivo, ex vivo and in blastoid models in vitro.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Clínica Eugin, Barcelona, Spain

    Mina Popovic & Felicitas Azpiroz

  2. CEGyR Medicina y Genética Reproductiva, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Felicitas Azpiroz

  3. Ghent Fertility and Stem cell Team (G-FaST), Department for Reproductive Medicine, Ghent University Hospital, Ghent, Belgium

    Susana M. Chuva de Sousa Lopes

  4. Department of Anatomy and Embryology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, the Netherlands

    Susana M. Chuva de Sousa Lopes

Authors
  1. Mina Popovic
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  2. Felicitas Azpiroz
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  3. Susana M. Chuva de Sousa Lopes
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Mina Popovic or Susana M. Chuva de Sousa Lopes.

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Popovic, M., Azpiroz, F. & Chuva de Sousa Lopes, S.M. Engineered models of the human embryo. Nat Biotechnol 39, 918–920 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-021-01004-4

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