ABOVE: In this image of a nine-day-old human-monkey chimera, human EPS cells are labeled in red. The trophectoderm layer, which contains placental precursors, is labeled in green and gray.
WEIZHI JI, KUNMING UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
There are hundreds of different cell types that make up the human body, each derived from a single origin: the fertilized egg. Researchers investigating how this complexity arises have made human-animal chimeric embryos by introducing human pluripotent stem cells into the embryos of other animals, such as mice and pigs. By tracking the outcomes of the human cells, they can discern how capable these cells are of differentiating into various cell types and contributing to the embryo. In work published in 2017, for instance, human cells contributed up to 1 percent of embryonic cells in a human-mouse chimera.
In a study published today (April 15) in Cell, researchers describe their progress in producing a ...
