Genome editing of human fertilized eggs has revealed early embryonic events that differ in timing from those in mice.
“This is the first time that CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing has been used to study the function of a gene in human embryos, which can lead to improvements in stem cell biology, IVF treatment, and knowledge of how human embryos develop in the first window of seven days, perhaps revealing causes of when pregnancy fails,” said Kathy Niakan, a developmental biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London and team leader, at a news conference yesterday. The work is reported today in Nature.
