摘要

Gastrulation is the process whereby the mass of cells that results from fertilization is shaped into the body plan of an organism. Understanding this process in humans is important as the origin of several syndromes and birth defects, map to this period. However, addressing this period experimentally is difficult due to technical, and more importantly, obvious ethical constrains. Over the last few years, alternatives to study gastrulation have emerged from the realization of the self-organizing abilities of Pluripotent Stem Cells and have led to a number of cellular models of the early stages of mammalian development. In this talk, I will discuss gastruloids, Pluripotent Stem Cell (PSC) based models of early mammalian development. First developed from mouse PSCs, they are created from small defined numbers of PSCs following specific chemical protocols. At the end of five days, the cells have organized themselves into structures that contain a set of orthogonal coordinates that serve as a reference for the organization of the primordia of most tissues and organs. At this time, mouse gastruloids mimic the organization of E8.5 embryos and human ones, Carnegie Stage 9. As such, they represent body plan post-gastrulation structures. Gastruloids lack a brain primordium, probably due to the heavy exposure to Wnt signalling. An important feature of gastruloids is their simplified morphology that lacks the detail characteristic of embryos and allows the exploration of many aspects of development revealing features that cannot be studied in embryos, in particular a disconnect between Gene Regulatory Networks and Morphogenesis.

个人简介

Alfonso Martinez Arias is currently ICREA Research Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He obtained a PhD from the University of Chicago (1983) and after a postdoc at the MRC Lab of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (UK) became affiliated with the University of Cambridge as a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow and, from 2001, as professor of Developmental Mechanick. In 2021 he moved to Barcelona. He is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization and of the Academia Europea and has received the Waddington medal of the British Society of Developmental Biology. Currently his work is at the interface between stem cell, developmental and systems biology. Alfonso has published over 190 articles in his field and  coauthors the classic text book in the field Wolpert’s Principles of Development (OUP). In 2023 he published “The Master Builder’(Basic Books) where he suggests a cell’s eye view of biology from the perspective of development.