A synthetic embryo, created in a British laboratory, has a beating heart and the foundations of a brain, scientists have announced.
The embryo was a mouse embryo generated from stem cells rather than fertilisation.
University of Cambridge scientists revealed their work in Nature yesterday.
Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, Professor in Mammalian Development and Stem Cell Biology, said: “It’s just unbelievable that we’ve got this far. This has been the dream of our community for years, and a major focus of our work for a decade, and finally we’ve done it.
“Our mouse embryo model not only develops a brain, but also a beating heart, all the components that go on to make up the body.”
She added: “This period of human life is so mysterious, so to be able to see how it happens in a dish – to have access to these individual stem cells, to understand why so many pregnancies fail and how we might be able to prevent that from happening – is quite special.
“We looked at the dialogue that has to happen between the different types of stem cell at that time – we’ve shown how it occurs and how it can go wrong.”
Professor Zernicka-Goetz believes the work is another step towards growing synthetic organs for transplants.
She said she was partly motivated by her own experience of pregnancy when she faced a scare when screening showed abnormal cells. Amniocentesis later showed her baby was normal.
She said: “The experience led me to study mosaic aneuploidy – a condition in which the embryo has cells with the wrong number of chromosomes alongside chromosomally normal cells. Incredibly, we found that these abnormal cells can be eliminated, and the normal, healthy cells compensate for their absence. For some reason this mechanism doesn’t operate in the tissues that build the placenta, and we’re still trying to understand why and how.”
Synthetic embryos complete gastrulation to neurulation and organogenesis. Nature 25 August 2022
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