Scientists have constructed the most complete and detailed single-cell map of embryo development in any animal to date, using the fruit fly as a model organism.
Published August 5 in Science, the study, co-led by BBI Scientific Director Dr. Jay Shendure and Dr. Eileen Furlong of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), harnesses data from over one million embryonic cells spanning all stages of embryo development and represents a significant advance at multiple levels. This fundamental research also aids scientists’ ability to pursue questions like how mutations lead to different developmental defects.
In addition, it provides a path to understand the vast non-coding part of our genome that contains most disease-associated mutations.
“Just capturing the entirety of embryogenesis – all stages and all cell types – to obtain a more complete view of the cell states and molecular changes that accompany development is a feat in its own right,” said Furlong, who is head of EMBL’s Genome Biology Unit. “But what I’m really excited about is the use of deep learning to obtain a continuous view of the molecular changes driving embryonic development – down to the minute.”
Embryonic development begins with the fertilization of an egg, followed by a series of cell divisions and decisions that give rise to a very complex multi-cellular embryo that can move, eat, sense, and interact with its environment. Researchers have been studying this process of embryonic development for over a hundred years, but only in the last decade have new technologies enabled scientists to identify molecular changes that accompany cell transitions at a single-cell level.
