What do the earliest stages of a pregnancy look like? Embryonic development has been extensively studied, but most of our knowledge of the earliest stages of a growing baby come from stationary ...

The research team discovered that glassware used to manipulate and culture fertilized eggs in the fields of assisted reproductive technology (ART), livestock farming, and basic research contains toxic ...

The earliest days after fertilization, once a sperm cell meets an egg, are shrouded in scientific mystery. The process of how a humble single cell becomes an organism fascinates scientists across ...

Over half of our genomes consists of thousands of remnants of ancient viral DNA, known as transposable elements, which are widespread across the tree of life. Once dismissed as the 'dark side' of the ...

Under his microscope, Jun Wu could see several tiny spheres, each less than 1 millimetre wide. They looked just like human embryos: a dark cluster of cells surrounded by a cavity, and then another ...

Cell division is an essential process for all life on earth, yet the exact mechanisms by which cells divide during early embryonic development have remained elusive – particularly for egg-laying ...

In A Nutshell Egg geometry drives development: The curved shape of a zebrafish egg causes unequal cell divisions, creating larger cells near the animal pole and smaller cells at the margin—a size ...

A research team showed that, contrary to current models, one early embryonic cell dominates lineages that will become the fetus. “They are not identical,” said Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, a ...