An international team of scientists led from Sweden's Karolinska Institutet has for the first time mapped all the genes that are activated in the first few days of a fertilized human egg. The study, ...

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 ...

Descriptions of the embryo go back at least to the time of Aristotle, but it has only been since the late 19 th century and early 20 th century that advances in experimental approaches allowed ...

Researchers have gained new insights into the mechanism behind the spatial organization of DNA within the cells of early embryos. When an embryo is first formed after fertilization, each cell has the ...

In some mammals, the timing of the normally continuous embryonic development can be altered to improve the chances of survival for both the embryo and the mother. This mechanism to temporarily slow ...

Chromosphaera perkinsii is a single-celled species discovered in 2017 in marine sediments around Hawaii. The first signs of its presence on Earth have been dated at over a billion years, well before ...

Microscopy image of a PGA at day 8 showing the early tissues supporting the embryo, including the amniotic sac and the yolk sac-like structures, surrounded by (extra-embryonic) mesoderm tissue.

Pregnant women rely on a balanced diet and supplements to deliver proper nutrients to their babies, to ensure they grow healthfully. Such nutrients contribute to fueling development and providing ...

Embryonic development is a finely orchestrated process in which a single cell differentiates into the myriad specialised tissues that comprise a fully formed organism. Central to this process are ...

Researchers have developed a new stem cell model of the mature human amniotic sac, which replicates development of the tissues supporting the embryo from two to four weeks after fertilization. This is ...

The world is full of unusual unicellular organisms and microbes, many of which have not been discovered yet. In 2017, scientists identified a single-celled marine organism called Chromosphaera ...