Building embryos from stem cells

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With two thirds of all pregnancies ending in the very first few days, it’s vital we understand the earliest stages of embryo-formation. In order to help, University of Cambridge’s Professor Magdalena Zernika-Goetzl has created a synthetic embryo from two different types of stem cell in mice. Picture: This image shows stem cell-modeled mouse embryo at 96 hours (left); Mouse embryo cultured in vitro for 48 hours from the blastocyst stage (right). The red part is embryonic and the blue extra-embryonic. Credit: Sarah Harrison and Gaelle Recher, Zernicka-Goetz Lab, University of Cambridge