All are welcome (attendance required for graduate students). Lunch is provided

Jianping Fu, University of Michigan, Mechanical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Cell and Developmental Biology

Synthetic human embryo-like structure: A new paradigm for human embryology

Early human embryonic development remains mysterious due to drastic species divergences
between humans and other mammalian models and limited accessibility to human embryo
samples. Recent studies from my laboratory and others have shown that under suitable
culture conditions human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) can undergo intricate morphogenetic
events and self-organize to form patterned human embryo-like structures in vitro. These
synthetic human embryonic-like tissues hold great promises for advancing human
embryology and reproductive medicine. In this talk, I will describe a hPSC-based, synthetic
3D model of human post-implantation development that recapitulates key developmental
landmarks successively, including pro-amniotic cavity formation, amniotic ectoderm-epiblast
patterning, primordial germ cell specification, and development of the primitive streak with
controlled anteroposterior polarity. We further show that the amniotic ectoderm, as the first
lineage that segregates from the epiblast upon implantation of the human embryo, functions
as a signaling center to trigger primitive streak development in the epiblast. Together, our
research has developed a powerful synthetic embryological model and provided new
understandings of previously inaccessible but critical embryogenic events in human
development.