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Comment
. 2013 Jan;15(1):13-5.
doi: 10.1038/ncb2665.

Humans put their eggs in more than one basket

Diana J Laird  1
Affiliations
Comment

Humans put their eggs in more than one basket

Diana J Laird. Nat Cell Biol. 2013 Jan.

Erratum in

  • Nat Cell Biol. 2013 Feb;15(2):229

Abstract

Primordial germ cell (PGC) development in the human fetus remains relatively uncharted. A new study suggests that epigenetic reprogramming and sex differentiation in human PGCs occur asynchronously over an extended time period. This finding raises questions and implications for in vitro PGC differentiation.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Comparison of models of PGC development in mice and humans. (a) Mouse PGCs (light grey) seem to remain as a single population that upregulates late markers such as VASA upon colonizing the gonad at around stage E11. Epigenetic reprogramming in mouse PGCs occurs over approximately 3 days during late migration and early gonad colonization. (b) Human PGCs (light orange) exist as a single population during migration that bifurcates into cKIT+ and VASA+ lineages at 11–12 weeks, more than 1 month after reaching the gonad. Although VASA+ PGCs enter meiosis in the fetal ovary, the fate of cKIT+ PGCs remains unclear. Epigenetic reprogramming in human PGCs probably occurs as an early wave of genome-wide demethylation (red) and a later wave of demethylation of imprinted loci (green) and depletion of H3K27me3 (blue).
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Comment on

References

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