A new discovery by researchers challenges our current understanding of gastrulation, the most important stage of early embryonic development.
When the zygote, or the fertilised egg, starts to develop, the soon forming inner cell mass, a cluster of cells that will eventually develop into the individual, retains its pluripotent stem cell potential for the first few weeks. In other words, every cell in this cluster has the ability to form an entire new individual and all of the hundreds of different cell types that the human body needs. The potential of stem cell therapies is based on this pluripotency of early embryonic stem cells.
Following gastrulation, the neural crest develops into a large number of cells that form various parts of the body. To name a few, tissues derived from the neural crest include pigment cells in the skin, the entire peripheral nervous system, the bones of the face and neck, parts of the heart, and several hormone-producing cell types -- in practice, cell types whose differentiation from a single germ layer should be impossible.
Cancers originating from the neural crest include melanoma and neuroblastoma, an often fatal disease in infants, which Dr. Kerosuo's research group is also investigating from the perspective of neural crest development.
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