Institute of Biomechanics and Medical Engineering, Department of Engineering Mechanics, School of Aerospace Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA; Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA; Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA.
Curr Opin Genet Dev. 2020 Aug;63:30-35. doi: 10.1016/j.gde.2020.02.013. Epub 2020 Mar 12.
Study of early human embryo development is essential for advancing reproductive and regenerative medicine. Traditional human embryological studies rely on embryonic tissue specimens, which are difficult to acquire due to technical challenges and ethical restrictions. The availability of human stem cells with developmental potentials comparable to pre-implantation and peri-implantation human embryonic and extraembryonic cells, together with properly engineered in vitro culture environments, allow for the first time researchers to generate self-organized multicellular structures in vitro that mimic the structural and molecular features of their in vivo counterparts. The development of these stem cell-based, synthetic human embryo models offers a paradigm-shifting experimental system for quantitative measurements and perturbations of multicellular development, critical for advancing human embryology and reproductive and regenerative medicine without using intact human embryos.
研究早期人类胚胎发育对于推进生殖和再生医学至关重要。传统的人类胚胎学研究依赖于胚胎组织标本，但由于技术挑战和伦理限制，这些标本难以获取。具有与着床前和着床后人类胚胎和胚胎外细胞相当的发育潜力的人类干细胞，以及经过适当工程设计的体外培养环境，使得研究人员首次能够在体外生成自我组织的多细胞结构，这些结构模拟其体内对应物的结构和分子特征。这些基于干细胞的合成人类胚胎模型的发展为定量测量和干扰多细胞发育提供了一个颠覆性的实验系统，对于推进人类胚胎学以及生殖和再生医学的发展非常重要，而无需使用完整的人类胚胎。
