Mansilla Mary, Wang Yao, Nie Guiying
Implantation and Pregnancy Research Laboratory, School of Health and Biomedical Sciences, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, 3083, Australia.
Sci Rep. 2025 Feb 10;15(1):4873. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-89022-z.
Ex vivo studies with first trimester placental tissues are crucial for understanding human placental development, and culturing placental villi in floating conditions is vital to mimic the natural setting. Moreover, being able to cryopreserve these scarce materials for ex vivo studies would open unprecedented avenues, as they are very limited to research and the need to culture freshly adds further hurdles while limiting efficient use. Here we showed that hanging drop method is a simple yet effective approach to culture placental floating villi. We also revealed that these functional units of the early-stage human placenta can be cryopreserved for culturing, and that frozen-thawed villi can regenerate the syncytial layer following denudation. We further illustrated the utility of frozen-thawed tissues to study syncytialization, while validating the importance of HtrA4 in the process which was shown previously in cell models. These represent significant new knowledge to the field of placental biology.
利用孕早期胎盘组织进行的体外研究对于理解人类胎盘发育至关重要，在漂浮条件下培养胎盘绒毛对于模拟自然环境至关重要。此外，能够冷冻保存这些用于体外研究的稀缺材料将开辟前所未有的途径，因为它们在研究中非常有限，新鲜培养的需求进一步增加了障碍，同时限制了有效利用。在这里，我们表明悬滴法是一种简单而有效的培养胎盘漂浮绒毛的方法。我们还发现，早期人类胎盘的这些功能单元可以冷冻保存用于培养，冻融后的绒毛在剥脱后可以再生合胞体层。我们进一步说明了冻融组织在研究合胞体化方面的实用性，同时验证了HtrA4在该过程中的重要性，这在之前的细胞模型中已有显示。这些代表了胎盘生物学领域的重要新知识。
