Published in

American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science Advances, 44(8), 2022

DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abl9583

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Early developmental plasticity enables the induction of an intermediate extraembryonic cell state

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Two fundamental elements of pre-implantation embryogenesis are cells’ intrinsic self-organization program and their developmental plasticity, which allows embryos to compensate for alterations in cell position and number; yet, these elements are still poorly understood. To be able to decipher these features, we established culture conditions that enable the two fates of blastocysts’ extraembryonic lineages—the primitive endoderm and the trophectoderm—to coexist. This plasticity emerges following the mechanisms of the first lineage segregation in the mouse embryo, and it manifests as an extended potential for extraembryonic chimerism during the pre-implantation embryogenesis. Moreover, this shared state enables robust assembly into higher-order blastocyst-like structures, thus combining both the cell fate plasticity and self-organization features of the early extraembryonic lineages.