At 25 days old, specimens could be the oldest primate embryos ever grown outside the womb.
. Past that point, all the embryos had collapsed, making it impossible to see more advanced stages of their development, such as early signs of the nervous system and organ formation.
But in the new studies, the researchers grew monkey embryos in small vials of culture medium, which allowed the embryos to grow in three dimensions as they would inside the womb. Both teams coaxed their embryos to survive for 25 days after fertilization.
By day 20, the embryos had developed a neural plate — one of the early hallmarks of the nervous system. As in natural embryos, this plate thickened and bent into a tube that forms the basis of the brain and spine. Wang and her team also pinpointed cells that would eventually become motor neurons. The insights gleaned from the lab-grown embryos will help researchers to develop a better understanding of early embryo development in primates, says Wang.
As in Wang’s study, most of the cells in the cultured monkey embryos were the same type as those typically seen in natural embryos 18 to 25 days after fertilization. When Tan and colleagues took a closer look at the embryos’ mesoderm cells, they found that some had differentiated into heart muscle cells and others had matured into cells found in the lining of blood and lymphatic vessels.
Naomi Moris, a developmental biologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, says that the studies present an important step in developing methods that can sustain embryos outside the womb for longer than had been possible previously. But she cautions that there is still a long way to go before lab-grown embryos will look and behave like the real thing. “They still look a bit different to how we would expect [them] to look at these stages,” says Moris, who was not involved in the research.
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