Professor Azim Surani

From genomic imprinting to early human development, the germline and totipotency

We are working on early human development, including the origin of the germ cell lineage, specification of primordial germ cells, and the epigenetic resetting of the ’immortal’ germ cell lineage, leading to the totipotent state.  We are exploring transmission of genetic and epigenetic information, including transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.  We work on early human preimplantation embryos and ex vivo fetal embryos, germ cells and developing gonads. We are developing in vitro models for early human and germline development, and germinoids to explore establishment of synthetic gametes.  We use multiple approaches in our studies including single cell analysis, high resolution imaging, gene editing  and bioinformatics.