Institute of Life Course and Medical Sciences, William Henry Duncan Building, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK.
Systems Bioengineering, DCEXS, Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
Bioessays. 2024 Dec;46(12):e2400123. doi: 10.1002/bies.202400123. Epub 2024 Aug 28.
Gastrulation is a key milestone in the development of an organism. It is a period of cell proliferation and coordinated cellular rearrangement, that creates an outline of the body plan. Our current understanding of mammalian gastrulation has been improved by embryo culture, but there are still many open questions that are difficult to address because of the intrauterine development of the embryos and the low number of specimens. In the case of humans, there are additional difficulties associated with technical and ethical challenges. Over the last few years, pluripotent stem cell models are being developed that have the potential to become useful tools to understand the mammalian gastrulation. Here we review these models with a special emphasis on gastruloids and provide a survey of the methods to produce them robustly, their uses, relationship to embryos, and their prospects as well as their limitations.
原胚形成是生物体发育的一个关键里程碑。它是一个细胞增殖和协调的细胞重排的时期，创建了身体计划的轮廓。胚胎培养提高了我们对哺乳动物原胚形成的理解，但仍有许多悬而未决的问题难以解决，这是因为胚胎在子宫内的发育和样本数量少。在人类的情况下，还存在与技术和伦理挑战相关的额外困难。在过去几年中，多能干细胞模型的发展具有成为理解哺乳动物原胚形成的有用工具的潜力。在这里，我们特别强调胚状体，对这些模型进行了综述，并提供了关于如何稳健地产生它们的方法、它们的用途、与胚胎的关系以及它们的前景和局限性的调查。
