ABOVE: An ovarian organoid made of egg-like cells (blue) generated from stem cells in culture with mouse ovarian somatic cells.
COURTESY OF NOBUHIKO HAMAZAKI
A core set of eight proteins can transform stem cells from mice into cells that look a lot like immature egg cells called oocytes. The egglike cells could not undergo meiosis to cut the total chromosomes in half as they should, but they could be fertilized by sperm and then divide until they hit the eight-cell stage of embryonic development, researchers report today (December 16) in Nature.
“This demonstrates that you can go directly from stem cells to oocytes. I think that is exciting,” Petra Hajkova, a developmental epigeneticist at Imperial College London who was not involved in the study, tells The Scientist. The work, she notes, will help researchers explore the basic biology of oocyte development. In the future, says study coauthor Nobuhiko Hamazaki of Kyushu ...
