In this UVA Today article, read about how UVA researchers Christine and Bernard Thisse first used fish embryos to tease out the developmental steps for creating more sophisticated mammal embryos like those found in mice.
In a recent landmark study, the laboratory of Bernard and Christine Thisse have shown that aggregates of mouse embryonic pluoripotent stem cells can be instructed, using an experimentally engineered morphogen signaling center, to develop embryo-like entities called embryoids. Similar to embryos in vivo, these embryoids form all three germ layers through a gastrulation-like process and exhibit a wide range of developmental structures, including a beating heart and vasculature, primitive gut and patterned neural tube. Embryoids derived from stem cells provide a powerful in vitro model of the mammalian embryo, and a promising tool for studies of normal development, tissue regeneration, as well as disease modelling.