Totipotent cells have the highest developmental potential of any cell, and in mouse embryos totipotency lasts for ~1.5 days where only the one- and two-cell stage blastomeres are truly totipotent. Because of this limitation, a great effort has been made in recent years to generate in vitro cell lines that have an even greater developmental capacity than that of PSCs: totipotent stem cells.īy the strictest definition, totipotency refers to the ability of a cell to give rise to an entire embryo including extraembryonic tissues. Thus, in general, PSCs lack the developmental capacity to give rise to extraembryonic tissues. In the context of embryogenesis, PSCs act as the in vitro representation of the pluripotent epiblast which gives rise to the embryo proper but not extraembryonic tissues. These cells have the remarkable ability to give rise to any cell in the adult body and can self-renew indefinitely in culture. The workhorse of the early embryo modeling field has been the pluripotent stem cell (PSC). Because of this, researchers have developed various in vitro models of early human embryogenesis to act as accessible proxies for human embryos. The understanding of human early embryogenesis is key to developing treatments for human developmental disease and infertility, but it has been hampered by ethical, legal, and technical limitations involving research using actual human embryos. Human totipotent-like cells have now been found within cultures of naïve human pluripotent stem cells and are able to give rise to both embryonic and extraembryonic tissues. Capturing totipotency in a dish has the potential to revolutionize basic science and translational medicine.
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