https://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. It's one of life's most defining moments—that crucial step in embryonic development, when an indistinct ball of cells rearranges itself into the orderly three-layered structure that sets the stage for all to come. Known as gastrulation, this crucial process unfolds in the third week of human development. https://phys.org/news/2024-03-stem-cell-glimpse-early-human.html Cell & Microbiology Mon, 25 Mar 2024 09:43:05 EDT news630578581 A new discovery by researchers challenges our current understanding of gastrulation, the most important stage of early embryonic development. https://phys.org/news/2023-09-important-early-stage-embryonic.html Cell & Microbiology Wed, 27 Sep 2023 09:53:03 EDT news615027181 Gastrulation, the process where an embryo reorganizes itself from a hollow sphere into a multilayered structure, is considered a "black box" of human development. This is because human embryos are typically not cultured for longer than 14 days because of bioethical concerns, and gastrulation occurs between 17- and 21-days post-fertilization. https://phys.org/news/2023-07-generate-human-embryo-like-extraembryonic-tissue.html Cell & Microbiology Thu, 20 Jul 2023 11:00:01 EDT news609062330 Materials scientists at UNSW Sydney have shown that human pluripotent stem cells in a lab can initiate a process resembling the gastrulation phase—where cells begin differentiating into new cell types—much earlier than occurs in mother nature. https://phys.org/news/2022-12-scientists-hydrogel-materials-stem-cells.html Cell & Microbiology Thu, 15 Dec 2022 10:37:05 EST news590323018 A collaboration of researchers from Japan, Spain and the U.S. offers a phylogenetic and ontogenetic overview of the primitive streak and its role in mediating amniote (vertebrate animals that develop on land) gastrulation, and discuss the implications of embryonic stem cell-based models of early mammalian embryogenesis on the function of this structure. https://phys.org/news/2021-12-human-body-gastrulation.html Evolution Thu, 02 Dec 2021 14:00:08 EST news557659898 Scientists from Helmholtz Zentrum München are revising the current textbook knowledge about gastrulation, the formation of the basic body plan, during embryonic development. Their study in mice has implications for cell replacement strategies and cancer research. https://phys.org/news/2021-06-gastrulation-reveals-embryonic.html Cell & Microbiology Thu, 24 Jun 2021 15:42:50 EDT news543768166 From birth, it takes humans almost two decades to reach adulthood; for a fruit fly, it takes only about 10 days. During a fly embryo's initial stages of development, the insect looks different from minute to minute, and its body plan is defined in just a few hours. Caltech researchers have now gained new insights into how a fly's genes influence this fast period of development—work that ultimately could shed light on the rapid cellular proliferation that occurs in other situations, including human cancers. https://phys.org/news/2018-12-rapidly-fruit.html Cell & Microbiology Wed, 19 Dec 2018 07:42:50 EST news464427760 Researchers at the University of Cambridge have managed to reconstruct the early stage of mammalian development using embryonic stem cells, showing that a critical mass of cells – not too few, but not too many – is needed for the cells to being self-organising into the correct structure for an embryo to form. https://phys.org/news/2014-11-reconstruct-early-stages-embryo.html Cell & Microbiology Tue, 04 Nov 2014 07:30:02 EST news334308586 (Phys.org) —Early embryonic development is a marvel of mechanics. Its signature step is the production of three tissue layers—mesoderm, ectoderm, and endoderm—through a topological maneuver known as gastrulation. While events that occur before, and after, this stage generally march to the beat of their own drum depending on the species of embryo, the invagination of external tissue to become internal tissue is a universally recognizable process. A recent paper published by Brunet et. al. in Nature Communications has now linked key conserved movements in gastrulation to specific molecular agents that make things happen at the critical hinge points. https://phys.org/news/2013-12-mechanical.html Cell & Microbiology Fri, 13 Dec 2013 12:15:38 EST news306159260 An international team of scientists using a new X-ray method recorded the internal structure and cell movement inside a living frog embryo in greater detail than ever before. https://phys.org/news/2013-05-x-ray-method-frog-embryos-thwart.html General Physics Fri, 17 May 2013 09:33:39 EDT news288002003 Classical X-ray radiographs provide information about internal, absorptive structures of organisms such as bones. Alternatively, X-rays can also image soft tissues throughout early embryonic development of vertebrates. Related to this, a new X-ray method was presented recently in a Nature article published by a German-American-Russian research team led by KIT. For periods of about two hours, time-lapse sequences of cellular resolution were obtained of three dimensional reconstructions showing developing embryos of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis). Instead of the absorption of X-rays, the method is based on their diffraction. https://phys.org/news/2013-05-x-ray-tomography-frog-embryo.html Cell & Microbiology Thu, 16 May 2013 10:39:45 EDT news287919575 (Phys.org) —A fundamental question in the evolution of animal body plans, is where did the head come from? In animals with a clear axis of right-left symmetry, the bilaterians, the head is where the brain is, at the anterior pole of the body. Little is known about the possible ancestor of bilaterians. Fortunately their sister group from that same progenitor, the cnidarians, can be studied in parallel today to give some clues. Cnidarians are creatures like jellyfish, hydra, and sea anemone which possess rudimentary nerve nets, but no clear brain. They all have just a single orifice to the external world, which basically does it all. In a recent paper published in PLOS Biology, researchers from the University of Bergen in Norway compared gene expression patterns in sea anemone (Nematostella vectensis, Nv) with that from a variety of bilaterian animals. They found that the head-forming region of bilaterians is actually derived from the aboral, the opposite-oral, side of the ancestral body plan. https://phys.org/news/2013-03-brain_1.html Evolution Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:28:14 EDT news283710442