Animal embryos go through a series of characteristic developmental stages on their journey from a fertilized egg cell to a functional organism. This biological process is largely genetically ...

A new discovery by researchers challenges our current understanding of gastrulation, the most important stage of early embryonic development. When the zygote, or the fertilised egg, starts to develop, ...

Technological, ethical and legal issues have limited the understanding of the early stages of embryonic development in humans, despite its importance in basic developmental biology and reproductive ...

Despite being an essential developmental process, the understanding of human embryonic genome activation is limited, owing to the lack of in vitro cell models and ethical concerns. To advance ...

What do the earliest stages of a pregnancy look like? Embryonic development has been extensively studied, but most of our knowledge of the earliest stages of a growing baby come from stationary ...

The earliest days after fertilization, once a sperm cell meets an egg, are shrouded in scientific mystery. The process of how a humble single cell becomes an organism fascinates scientists across ...

Two to three weeks after conception, an embryo faces a critical point in its development. In the stage known as gastrulation, the transformation of embryonic cells into specialized cells begins. This ...

A research team showed that, contrary to current models, one early embryonic cell dominates lineages that will become the fetus. “They are not identical,” said Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, a ...

Researchers at the Babraham Institute have ‘listened in’ to the communication between the embryo and the womb lining at the ...

A recent Nature study evaluates post-implantation development in humans using embryo-like models based on genetically unmodified human naïve embryonic stem cells (ESCs). Study: Complete human day 14 ...

The image shows cross sections from four different developmental stages in the early embryo from gastrulation (flat) to the end of neurulation. Unexpectedly, the study revealed that stem cells that ...