Who is feeding the embryo while the placenta is under construction?

IWhat if we could actually watch the conversation between a fetus and its mother? Not metaphorically—the individual cells, where they are, what genes they're expressing, and how that conversation changes over the course of pregnancy. That's essentially what Dr. Fisher and her team have done in their creation of an atlas of the maternal fetal interface, that irregular boundary formed between mother and fetus key to all human life on the planet. This week I'll continue my conversati...

I don't think I can oversell today's episode. We'll discuss the most detailed atlas of the maternal fetal interface-- that meeting and intermingling of maternal and fetal cells that sets the stage for placental creation and development. The sheer awe of the accomplishment of the research we will talk about today may be something that draws you in to this conversation. This work represents the cutting edge of pregnancy research, and it shows how unbelievably complicated it is...

Since women have been having babies, they've experienced miscarriage. For nearly as long, we have not had a useful way to address miscarriage. Often doctors shrug at your first miscarriage and say it's a normal part of pregnancy. And if it arises because of aneuploidy, the fertilized egg is the wrong number of chromosomes--at this point, there's not much we can do about it. But there are alternative routes to miscarriage. Today's guest is working to better understand o...

Embryos speak multiple languages. They can communicate through chemistry, which has been known for a long time, and as today's guest will describe, they can also detect physical features of their environment and alter their biology in response--which is to say they are mechanosensitive. They can generate forces that deform their surroundings, and they can respond to the force cues around them. We'll talk more today about the experiments that allowed us all to witness this ability ...

If you're on the internet even a little bit, you likely saw the viral video first released last August That showed for the first time what a human embryo implanting into a 3D matrix looked like. The video comes from work trying to explore what the embryo is actually doing during implantation. Despite how critical this process is, implantation, required for any and every pregnancy, is one of those black box topics. Both the details of exactly how the blastocyst attaches to th...