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Stem cells

Modeling human trunk development

Nature Biotechnology (2023)Cite this article

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A model of the embryonic human trunk attains a more mature developmental stage than previous models.

Research on the developmental processes that form the mammalian trunk — the part of the body spanning from head to limbs — has entered a new chapter in recent years with the establishment of tractable in vitro models. Starting from pluripotent stem cells, these models reconstruct early embryonic events in vitro to generate structures that resemble the somites and the neural tube in morphology and in cell lineage patterning1,2,3,4,5,6,7. Writing in Nature Biotechnology, Gribaudo et al. have now taken the field one step further8. They describe the generation of human organoids that recapitulate spatial and temporal patterning of the spinal cord up to a much later stage than in previously reported systems. Importantly, their model not only gives rise to terminally differentiated cell types but also exhibits accurate regionalization of the trunk spinal cord. Their experiments demonstrate that it should be possible to push these systems to study even later aspects of development, such as HOX gene–dependent regionalization.

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Fig. 1: A stem cell-derived model of human trunk development recapitulates spinal cord differentiation and patterning.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Yuchuan Miao & Olivier Pourquié

  2. Department of Pathology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA, USA

    Yuchuan Miao & Olivier Pourquié

  3. Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Olivier Pourquié

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  1. Yuchuan Miao
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  2. Olivier Pourquié
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Correspondence to Olivier Pourquié.

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Miao, Y., Pourquié, O. Modeling human trunk development. Nat Biotechnol (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-023-02048-4

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