The text books make an educated guess of what happened during this part of development, but we now know that what I learned and what I teach my students about this was totally wrong.
- Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz
Their results – which will lead to the rewriting of biology text books worldwide – are published in the journal Cell.
Embryo development in mammals occurs in two phases. During the first phase, pre-implantation, the embryo is a small, free-floating ball of cells called a blastocyst. In the second, post-implantation, phase the blastocyst embeds itself in the mother’s uterus.
While blastocysts can be grown and studied outside the body, the same has not been true from implantation. And because embryos are so closely connected to their mothers, implantation has also been difficult to study in the womb.
According to study author Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz of the University of Cambridge: “We know a lot about pre-implantation, but what happens after implantation – and particularly the moment of implantation – is an enigma.”
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Image: The mouse embryo's own stem cells organise themselves into a rosette-like arrangement as a pre-requisite for laying the foundations for the body when the embryo would implant into the uterus.
Credit: Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, Dr Ivan Bedzhov
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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