An international team of scientists led from Sweden's Karolinska Institutet has for the first time mapped all the genes that are activated in the first few days of a fertilized human egg. The study, ...

A new "atlas" of early embryonic development in mammals suggests that the process is highly chaotic — but there is some method to the madness. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn ...

The architecture of the body is not encoded as a formal blueprint; rather, it's the tightly orchestrated activation and ...

Over half of our genomes consist of thousands of remnants of ancient viral DNA, known as transposable elements, which are widespread across the tree of life. Once dismissed as the "dark side" of the ...

A stretch of viral DNA in the mouse genome gives cells in early-stage embryos the potential to become almost any cell type in the body.

Researchers have gained new insights into the mechanism behind the spatial organization of DNA within the cells of early embryos. When an embryo is first formed after fertilization, each cell has the ...

Biologists have provided new insights on a longstanding puzzle in biology: How complex organisms arise from a single fertilized cell. Producing a new 'gene atlas' with 4-D imaging, the researchers ...

Cell division is an essential process for all life on earth, yet the exact mechanisms by which cells divide during early embryonic development have remained elusive – particularly for egg-laying ...

A research team showed that, contrary to current models, one early embryonic cell dominates lineages that will become the fetus. “They are not identical,” said Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, a ...