Submitted by Christina Rozeik on Tue, 13/08/2019 - 13:34
Researchers from the Babraham Institute and the Gurdon Institute will contribute to a world-first research project that will unravel how human embryos develop in the first weeks and months after fertilisation, improving our understanding of fertility, birth defects and regenerative medicine.
The £10 million Wellcome-funded Human Developmental Biology Initiative (HDBI) will build a ‘family tree’ of how cells divide and specialise following fertilisation, to understand how tissues and organs develop and reveal new insights into how this process can go wrong. Cambridge Reproduction SRI and Babraham Institute members Professor Wolf Reik, Dr Gavin Kelsey and Dr Peter Rugg-Gunn, all group leaders in the Babraham Institute’s Epigenetics research programme, will contribute their expertise in studying early development utilising single-cell analysis and stem cells.Also involved are three researchers from the Gurdon Institute: Professor Azim Surani, who is a co-lead on the project ‘cell lineage in human epiblast specification and early differentiation’; Emma Rawlins, who is a co-lead for ‘human lineage analysis in a 3D spatial context: cardio-pulmonary system development’; and Ben Simons is a lead for one of the three cross-cutting technology platforms: computational biology and data analysis.
For many years, developmental studies have relied on cellular and animal models. To address this, the HDBI will tackle some of the biggest challenges that are holding the field back. Very few labs have access to human embryo tissue samples meaning that key pieces of research that will underpin the field have yet to be carried out. And when available, this tissue is incredibly diverse, reflecting the genetic and environmental origins, making insights hard to define.
By bringing the research community together, along with recent advances in embryo and organoid models, more sophisticated imaging techniques and genome editing mean that researchers can now gain unprecedented insights into human development. Analysis of cell-fate specification in the early embryo will use a parallel nucleosome, methylation and transcriptome sequencing method (scNMT-seq) pioneered in the Reik and Kelsey labs.
The project will involve donated human embryos and human foetal tissue. The UK has a strong regulatory and legal framework and the HDBI will work within and respect these regulations. The Initiative will actively work to consider the ethical issues raised by this growing area of research and includes a specific ethics programme and public engagement programme.
For more information about the HDBI, please see the Babraham Institute's press release: https://www.babraham.ac.uk/news/2019/07/human-developmental-biology-initiative-announced.