ABOVE: JACOB HANNA
Most mammalian development typically happens tucked away inside of a mother’s uterus, protected from predators and the prying eyes of scientists. A new technique developed by researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel allows a mouse embryo to grow in a carefully controlled environment within clear glass bottles, outside of the uterus. The team described the method Wednesday (March 17) in Nature.
“The holy grail of developmental biology is to understand how a single cell, a fertilized egg, can make all of the specific cell types in the human body and grow into 40 trillion cells,” developmental biologist Paul Tesar of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine who was not involved in the research tells The New York Times. “Since the beginning of time, researchers have been trying to develop ways to answer this question.”
Traditionally, seeing how the different tissues and features form ...
