TY - JOUR
T1 - The road to generating transplantable organs
T2 - From blastocyst complementation to interspecies chimeras
AU - Zheng, Canbin
AU - Ballard, Emily B.
AU - Wu, Jun
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd
PY - 2021/6
Y1 - 2021/6
N2 - Growing human organs in animals sounds like something from the realm of science fiction, but it may one day become a reality through a technique known as interspecies blastocyst complementation. This technique, which was originally developed to study gene function in development, involves injecting donor pluripotent stem cells into an organogenesis-disabled host embryo, allowing the donor cells to compensate for missing organs or tissues. Although interspecies blastocyst complementation has been achieved between closely related species, such as mice and rats, the situation becomes much more difficult for species that are far apart on the evolutionary tree. This is presumably because of layers of xenogeneic barriers that are a result of divergent evolution. In this Review, we discuss the current status of blastocyst complementation approaches and, in light of recent progress, elaborate on the keys to success for interspecies blastocyst complementation and organ generation.
AB - Growing human organs in animals sounds like something from the realm of science fiction, but it may one day become a reality through a technique known as interspecies blastocyst complementation. This technique, which was originally developed to study gene function in development, involves injecting donor pluripotent stem cells into an organogenesis-disabled host embryo, allowing the donor cells to compensate for missing organs or tissues. Although interspecies blastocyst complementation has been achieved between closely related species, such as mice and rats, the situation becomes much more difficult for species that are far apart on the evolutionary tree. This is presumably because of layers of xenogeneic barriers that are a result of divergent evolution. In this Review, we discuss the current status of blastocyst complementation approaches and, in light of recent progress, elaborate on the keys to success for interspecies blastocyst complementation and organ generation.
KW - Blastocyst complementation
KW - Chimera competency
KW - Interspecies chimera
KW - Interspecies organogenesis
KW - Pluripotent stem cell
KW - Xenogeneic barriers
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U2 - 10.1242/dev.195792
DO - 10.1242/dev.195792
M3 - Review article
C2 - 34132325
AN - SCOPUS:85108246066
SN - 0950-1991
VL - 148
JO - Development (Cambridge)
JF - Development (Cambridge)
IS - 12
M1 - dev195792
ER -