Fredrik Lanner

Lineage specification in the developing blastocyst

Embryonic stem cells (ESC) have the remarkable potential to give rise to any cell type in the human body. This breakthrough has created exciting new prospects for biomedical research and for regenerative medicine. To safely harvest their full potential, we need to understand the developmental mechanisms maintaining pluripotency and specifying linage in vivo. ESC cultures have recently been shown to be heterogeneous, where cells continuously oscillate between a naïve state and a state more primed for differentiation. The inner cell mass (ICM) of the blastocyst has also been shown to display similar heterogeneity, expressing markers of epiblast (EPI) and primitive endoderm (PE) respectively. The underlying mechanisms driving the heterogeneity and lineage specification are still unknown. The aim of my studies is to investigate the mechanisms driving EPI and PE lineage specification in the developing blastocyst and how this correlates to the observed heterogeneity in ESC.