Oct4 niakan s human embryos. Medical search. Frequent questions

Dr Kathy Niakan from the Francis Crick Institute, who led the research, adds: "One way to find out what a gene does in the developing embryo is to see what happens when it isn't working. (nihr.ac.uk)
Kathy Niakan and colleagues are providing new understanding of the genes responsible for a crucial change when groups of cells in the very early embryo first become organised and set on different paths of development. (nihr.ac.uk)
But lead scientist Dr Kathy Niakan said that the research could fundamentally change our understanding of human biology and give hope to prospective parents. (redice.tv)
A spokesman for the HFEA said: "Our Licence Committee has approved an application from Dr Kathy Niakan of the Francis Crick Institute to renew her laboratory's research licence to include gene editing of embryos. (redice.tv)
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has renewed Crick group leader Kathy Niakan 's licence to edit human embryos, allowing her team to continue their research into early human development. (crick.ac.uk)

British scientists have been granted permission to genetically modify human embryos by the fertility regulator. (redice.tv)

Currently it is not illegal to edit human embryos for research purposes although it has never been done before because they technology has not been available. (redice.tv)

We were surprised to see just how crucial this gene is for human embryo development, but we need to continue our work to confirm its role" says Dr Norah Fogarty from the Francis Crick Institute, first author of the study. (nihr.ac.uk)

The team spent over a year optimising their techniques using mouse embryos and human embryonic stem cells before starting work on human embryos. (nihr.ac.uk)
To do this, she was first to establish RNA interference in mammalian cells to determine cell fate in the mouse embryos. (wikipedia.org)

the majority were donated by couples who had completed their family, and wanted their surplus embryos to be used for research. (nihr.ac.uk)
Under the existing licence, patients at fertility clinics can choose to donate their surplus embryos to the research. (crick.ac.uk)

The study found that human embryos need OCT4 to correctly form a blastocyst. (nihr.ac.uk)
She uncovered the mechanism underlying embryo remodelling between the blastocyst and gastrula stages that has led to a change in the textbook model. (wikipedia.org)
The knowledge she gained through her work on how the embryo develops during the blastocyst to gastrula transition, allowed her to mimic these developmental processes with different types of stem cells in vitro. (wikipedia.org)
The reason why I think this is so important is that most human embryos fail to reach the blastocyst stage. (redice.tv)

To inactivate OCT4, they used an editing technique called CRISPR/Cas9 to change the DNA of 41 human embryos. (nihr.ac.uk)
Frequent loss-of-heterozygosity in CRISPR-Cas9-edited early human embryos. (tomorrowsci.com)

We believe that this research could improve our understanding of the very earliest stages of human life. (redice.tv)
Being able to introduce edits at the point of fertilisation will allow the team to study the earliest stages of embryo development and achieve reliable results using fewer embryos. (crick.ac.uk)
By studying human embryos from the earliest stages, the team aims to understand how these cells become and remain pluripotent, and how they lose their pluripotency when they specialise. (crick.ac.uk)
Donated embryos remain vital to our work, but to study the very earliest stages of development we need to start at day zero. (crick.ac.uk)

The study was done under a research licence and strict regulatory oversight from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the UK Government's independent regulator overseeing infertility treatment and research. (nihr.ac.uk)
The renewal builds on the existing licence and will allow for a broader range of research activity including creating embryos from donated sperm and eggs. (crick.ac.uk)
Most embryos donated under the current licence come from couples who have successfully completed IVF and want their stored embryos to be used for research. (crick.ac.uk)

Pluripotent' stem cells can become any other type of cell, and they can be derived from embryos or created from adult cells such as skin cells. (nihr.ac.uk)
Human pluripotent stem cells, with their ability to proliferate indefinitely and to differentiate into virtually all cell types of the human body, provide a novel resource to study human development and to implement relevant disease models. (mdpi.com)
Here, we employed a human pancreatic differentiation platform complemented with an shRNA screen in human pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) to identify potential drivers of early endoderm and pancreatic development. (mdpi.com)

These "synthetic embryos" recapitulate the natural architecture of the embryo and their patterns of gene expression leading to the specification of the germ layers and germ cells. (wikipedia.org)
All cells in a human embryo have the same DNA code, but they divide into specialised cells depending on gene expression. (redice.tv)
Fluorescent images showing gene expression in early human embryos, where blue is each cell of the embryo, green is the OCT4 gene, red is the NANOG gene and yellow is overlapping expression showing cells that eventually give rise to the embryo proper or fetus. (crick.ac.uk)

Researchers have used genome editing technology to reveal the role of a key gene in human embryos in the first few days of development. (nihr.ac.uk)
This is the first time that genome editing has been used to study gene function in human embryos, which could help scientists to better understand the biology of our early development. (nihr.ac.uk)
The team used genome editing techniques to stop a key gene from producing a protein called OCT4, which normally becomes active in the first few days of human embryo development. (nihr.ac.uk)
Dr Niakan said: "If you imagine the genome as volumes in an encyclopaedia, at some point in the development some of the cells will start to read a different volume compared to its neighbour cell. (redice.tv)

Doctors create multiple embryos to increase the chances of producing a viable embryo, as they do not all develop correctly. (crick.ac.uk)

These pluripotent stem cell lines could help scientists to study and better understand human diseases at a cellular level and potentially develop new therapies. (crick.ac.uk)

Dr Niakan's proposed research is important for understanding how a healthy human embryo develops and will enhance our understanding of IVF success rates, by looking at the very earliest stage of human development - one to seven days. (redice.tv)

The team at Francis Crick are already in talks with fertility clinics across the country to use their spare embryos. (redice.tv)

If we knew the key genes that embryos need to develop successfully, we could improve IVF treatments and understand some causes of pregnancy failure. (nihr.ac.uk)
The scientists want to deactivate genes in leftover embryos from IVF clinics to see if it hinders development. (redice.tv)
If scientists knew which genes were crucial for healthy cell division, then they could screen out embryos where their DNA was not working properly, potentially preventing miscarriages and aiding fertility. (redice.tv)
The initial pilot, which will also have to pass an ethics evaluation, will involve up to 30 embryos and the team would like to work on a further three genes, which could bring the total of to 120. (redice.tv)
We would really like to understand the genes that are needed for an embryo to develop into a healthy baby," she told a briefing in central London last month. (redice.tv)
Kathy's research focuses on the first 14 days of embryo development, looking at the key genes and factors that tell the cells in the embryo what to do. (crick.ac.uk)

The most promising-looking embryos are selected for transfer into the womb while others are frozen in storage. (crick.ac.uk)

Her recent development of systems permitting both mouse and human embryogenesis during implantation and early post-implantation stages in vitro allowed her to reveal that mouse and human embryo remodelling at implantation is done autonomously by the embryo. (wikipedia.org)
Her demonstration of the self-organisation of human embryos developing in vitro until day 13/14, gastrulation, has provided an unprecedented opportunity to study human development at previously inaccessible and critical stages. (wikipedia.org)

In a typical in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment, approximately a dozen eggs from the woman are mixed with sperm in the lab to create embryos. (crick.ac.uk)

It has ignored the warnings of over a hundred scientists worldwide and given permission for a procedure which could have damaging far-reaching implications for human beings. (redice.tv)
Scientists Edited Human Embryos in the Lab, and It Was a Disaster. (tomorrowsci.com)

After seven days, embryo development was stopped and the embryos were analysed. (nihr.ac.uk)
As well as human embryo development, OCT4 is thought to be important in stem cell biology. (nihr.ac.uk)
The study has been carried out with full regulatory oversight and offers new knowledge of the biological processes at work in the first five or six days of a human embryo's healthy development. (nihr.ac.uk)
Dr. Kay Elder, study co-author from the Bourn Hall Clinic, says: "Successful IVF treatment is crucially dependent on culture systems that provide an optimal environment for healthy embryo development. (nihr.ac.uk)
Between day five and seven of human development and embryo has around 200 cells of three different types. (redice.tv)
Using MICA, we generated the first GRN inferences in early human development. (bvsalud.org)

Human embryonic stem cells are taken from a part of the developing embryo that has high levels of OCT4. (nihr.ac.uk)
This led her to the pioneering success of constructing embryo-like structures from pluripotent embryonic and multipotent extra-embryonic (trophoblast) stem cells in a 3D scaffold of extra-cellular matrix proteins in vitro. (wikipedia.org)
Her lab generated an experimental model to find that aneuploid cells arising during embryogenesis in the mouse embryo become eliminated by apoptosis in embryonic but not extra-embryonic tissues. (wikipedia.org)
The potential use of embryonic stem cells (ESCs) for cell replacement therapies is limited by ethical concerns and the technical hurdles associated with their isolation from human embryos. (biomedcentral.com)

Creating embryos from donated sperm and eggs is an important next step in our research," explains Kathy. (crick.ac.uk)

We are a biomedical discovery institute researching the biology underlying human health. (crick.ac.uk)

this research will significantly help treatment for infertile couples, by helping us to identify the factors that are essential for ensuring that human embryos can develop into healthy babies. (nihr.ac.uk)

In the early human embryo, most cells will go on to form the placenta or yolk sac while a small number of cells will eventually form the foetus. (crick.ac.uk)
These 'pluripotent' cells multiply and will eventually go on to form the entire human body, so each one is capable of becoming any other type of human cell. (crick.ac.uk)

At that time, she also began to trace the origins and destinies of cells in the preimplantation mouse embryo that let her to discover that cell fate specification begins earlier than expected, an unexpected discovery but subsequently validated by her group and others. (wikipedia.org)
This system allowed her to identify signalling pathways responsible for morphogenesis of stem cells into embryos. (wikipedia.org)
We are trying to improve our understanding of these unique cells by studying the precursors of these cells in their natural environment, the human embryo. (crick.ac.uk)

Other research methods, including studies in mice, suggested a later and more focused role for OCT4, so our results highlight the need for human embryo research. (nihr.ac.uk)
As with all embryos used in research, it is illegal to transfer them to a woman for treatment. (redice.tv)

This provides an opportunity to identify quantitatively and non-invasively the healthiest embryos to transfer to would-be-mothers in IVF. (wikipedia.org)

citation needed] In 2023, her team created the first human embryo models. (wikipedia.org)

They hope to use this knowledge to establish pluripotent stem cell lines that can be taken out of the embryo and multiplied in the laboratory for many years. (crick.ac.uk)
In contexts with limited single-cell samples, such as the early human embryo inference of transcription factor-gene regulatory network (GRN) interactions is especially difficult. (bvsalud.org)
Here, we assessed application of different linear or non-linear GRN predictions to single-cell simulated and human embryo transcriptome datasets. (bvsalud.org)

In 2020, she was listed by Prospect as the 10th-greatest thinker for the COVID-19 era, with the magazine writing, "She's been able to grow human embryos in vitro right up to the current 14-day legal limit. (wikipedia.org)

Salistick detects pregnancy by identifying a hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), which is present in the body of a pregnant person. (medicaldaily.com)

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