ABOVE: Endometrial stromal fibroblasts, one of the endometrial cell types which expresses HAND2
MICHAEL SULAK
The paper
M. Marinić et al., “Evolutionary transcriptomics implicates HAND2 in the origins of implantation and regulation of gestation length,” eLife, doi:10:e61257, 2021.
Scientists don’t fully understand the molecular mechanisms that conclude human pregnancies. Simply put: “We don’t know how women go [into] labor,” says Mirna Marinić, a developmental biologist at the University of Chicago, adding that pregnancy in animal models is often too different from that of humans to be very informative.
Still, understanding how differences between animal and human pregnancies arise could provide novel insights into how labor is triggered. Marinić and her team compared gene expression profiles in the endometrial tissue that forms the maternal-fetal barrier across 27 species—including 18 live-birthing mammals, the egg-laying platypus, and eight other egg-laying animals—to look for shifts in gene expression associated with the evolution of different reproductive strategies.
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