Gastrulation was described by biologist Professor Lewis Wolpert as being ‘truly the most important event in your life’ because it creates the blueprint of an organism
- Alfonso Martinez-Arias
All organisms develop from embryos: a cell divides generating many cells. In the early stages of this process, all cells look alike and tend to aggregate into a featureless structure, more often than not a ball. Then, the cells begin to ‘specialise’ into different types of cell and space out asymmetrically, forming an axis which begins to provide a structure for the embryo to develop along.
In animal embryos this stage is followed by a process known as gastrulation: a choreographed movement of the cells that, using the initial axis as a reference, positions the head and the tail, the front and the back. During the process, the cells begin to forum three distinct layers: the endoderm, mesoderm and ectoderm, determining which tissues or organs the cells will then develop into.
Professor Alfonso Martinez-Arias from the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge, who led the research, says: “Gastrulation was described by biologist Professor Lewis Wolpert as being ‘truly the most important event in your life’ because it creates the blueprint of an organism. Axis formation and gastrulation are the two central processes that initiate the development of an organism and are inextricably associated with the embryo. We have managed to recreate this for the first time in the lab.”
Professor Martinez-Arias and colleagues, supported by the European Research Council and the Wellcome Trust, have reconstructed these early stages of development using mouse embryonic stem cells.
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Image: Early stage embryo
Credit: Alfonso Martinez-Arias
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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