Mathematical Biology Seminar

Most of our current knowledge of mammalian embryology is derived from studies of the mouse embryo. However, mammalian development involves substantial divergence in the mechanism and order of cell-fate allocations among species, and there has been a critical lack of information regarding human development due to the scarcity of human embryo specimens. 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 embryo-like structures have sparked great interests in using such human development models for advancing human embryology, embryo toxicology, and reproductive medicine. In this talk, I will first discuss our effort in developing a micropatterned hPSC-based neuroectoderm developmental model, wherein pre-patterned geometrical confinement induces emergent patterning of neuroepithelial (NE) and neural plate border (NPB) cells, mimicking neuroectoderm regionalization during early neurulation. In the second part of my talk, I will discuss our work in developing a hPSC-based, synthetic embryological model of human post-implantation development that recapitulates multiple embryogenic events including amniotic cavity formation, amnion-epiblast patterning, and primitive streak formation. Together, our studies provide novel insight into previously inaccessible but critical embryogenic events in human development. Continuous development of these human development models will provide synthetic embryological platforms that open up previously inaccessible phases of the human life cycle to experimental study. Speaker(s): Jianping Fu (UM Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering)