Synthetic embryos obtained without eggs or sperm advance to organ formation.

[NNadir]

Regrettably, I won't have a lot of time to discuss this note in the current issue of Nature.

The news item is here: Mouse embryos grown without eggs or sperm: why and what’s next?

Subtitle:

Two research teams grew synthetic embryos using stem cells, long enough to see some organs develop.

The full paper is available in an "accelerated release" format and is here: Synthetic embryos complete gastrulation to neurulation and organogenesis. Amadei, G., Handford, C.E., Qiu, C. et al. . Nature (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05246-3 A similar paper on the same topic has been published in Cell.

Excerpts from the news item:

The recipe for mammalian life is simple: take an egg, add sperm and wait. But two new papers demonstrate that there’s another way. Under the right conditions, stem cells can divide and self-organize into an embryo on their own. In studies published in Cell1 and Nature2 this month, two groups report that they have grown synthetic mouse embryos for longer than ever before. The embryos grew for 8.5 days, long enough for them to develop distinct organs — a beating heart, a gut tube and even neural folds.

The process is far from perfect. Just a tiny fraction of the cells develop these features and those that do don’t entirely mimic a natural embryo. But the work still represents a major advance that will help scientists to see organ development in unprecedented detail. “This is very, very exciting,” says Jianping Fu, a bioengineer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “The next milestone in this field very likely will be a synthetic stem-cell based human embryo,” he says.

The two research teams achieved the feat using similar techniques. Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, a developmental and stem-cell biologist with laboratories at the University of Cambridge, UK, and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, has been working on this problem for a decade. “We started with only embryonic stem cells,” she says. “They can mimic early stages of development, but we couldn’t take it any further.” Then, a few years ago, her team discovered3 that when they added stem cells that give rise to the placenta and yolk sac, their embryos developed further. Last year, they demonstrated4 that they could use this technique to culture embryos until day 7. In their latest paper, published in Nature today, Zernicka-Goetz’s team describes how they grew embryos for another 1.5 days...

I suspect the news item is open sourced, if not the accelerated release paper.

[Farmer-Rick]

1. So will Christians consider it a person?

Will it have special rights to takeover their human lab assistant's bodies? Will Christians prosecute the person holding the test tube for murder if it breaks? When exactly will they decide the lump of cells is a baby? When the stem cell splits or when the pipette touches the test tube?

I'm sure Christians will have all the answers and they will let their Supremely Religious Court know how to rule on all future developments.

[The Magistrate]

2. I Don't Think I Will Like This Movie, Sir....

"It's alive! Alive, I tell you!"

[Bayard]

3. Fascinating

The maniacal zealots will really lose their minds.

Growing bodies for spare parts would be a gigantic scientific and medical breakthough, and somewhat horrifying at the same time.