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 ...

Technological, ethical and legal issues have limited the understanding of the early stages of embryonic development in humans, despite its importance in basic developmental biology and reproductive ...

Two to three weeks after conception, an embryo faces a critical point in its development. In the stage known as gastrulation, the transformation of embryonic cells into specialized cells begins. This ...

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 ...

In the earliest hours after fertilization, an embryo takes its first steps toward becoming a living organism by shedding maternal control and activating its own genetic program. This critical process, ...

A new study from the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS) in London, UK reveals how ancient viral DNA once written off as "junk" plays a crucial role in the earliest moments of life. The research, ...

The discovery of a gene essential to early embryonic development sheds light on the preliminary stages of human placenta formation. A team led by scientists from the University of California San Diego ...

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, ...

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 ...