Periodic Reporting for period 4 - COREMA (Cell division and the origin of embryonic aneuploidy in preimplantation mouse development)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2021-07-01 do 2021-12-31
(1) Technology development:
To enable imaging of the long-term fate of individual chromosomes over several divisions in the living preimplantation mouse embryo, we designed the 2nd generation inverted light sheet microscope (iSPIM2) which features extension of a thin light sheet through the entire embryo volume while decreasing the applied light dose to be able to image all blastomeres with high resolution and low phototoxicity. The final design offers thin light sheets with tunable properties and dual, high-powered detection objectives result in high resolution, high contrast views throughout the embryo volume. The iSPIM2 has been validated for multiple samples including mouse embryos (Kromm, Lin, et al., in preparation; patent application has been filed). In parallel we developed computational tracking pipelines to construct a 4D chromosome map of mouse preimplantation development. An open-source tracking implementation is publicly available (https://git.embl.de/grp-ellenberg/kinetochore_tracking).
(1) Biological studies:
The first embryonic division is of particular importance as it facilitates the union of the maternal and paternal genomes. In the past it has been believed that a single spindle combines the maternal and paternal chromosomes. However, we could show that two bipolar spindles form in the zygote which independently congress the maternal and paternal chromosomes, keeping the parental genomes apart during the first cleavage. This intriguing spindle assembly mechanism provides a potential rationale for the erroneous divisions into more than two blastomeric nuclei observed in mammalian zygotes, and reveals the mechanism behind the observation that parental genomes occupy separate nuclear compartments in the two-cell embryo (Reichmann et al., doi:10.1126/science.aar7462). While the zygotic division faces the special challenge of organising two initially separate parental genomes in two spindles, also the subsequent embryonic divisions are highly error prone. We therefore extended our study to characterize the first five cell divisions. To unravel molecular mechanisms of embryonic aneuploidy generation we tested the different mechanisms potentially involved in aneuploidy generation and it became clear that likely an interplay and synergy between several mechanisms is responsible. We also investigated spindle assembly in the bovine system, where (as in humans) only two MTOCs (centrosomes) are present after fertilisation and centriole duplication. In collaboration with Tom Stout and Marta de Ruijter-Villani from the Department of Clinical Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at Utrecht University, we found that the two spindles also frequently form even in the presence of the two centrosomes. We showed that two independent spindles form despite the presence of centrosomes, which had little effect on spindle structure and were only loosely connected to the two spindles. We concluded that the dual spindle assembly pathway is conserved in nonrodent mammals, which could explain whole parental genome loss frequently observed in blastomeres of human IVF embryos (Schneider et al., doi:10.1083/jcb.202010106).
The discovery of the existence of the dual spindle resulted in a broad media coverage across the world and interest by the general public. The impact of this work was highlighted in several German newspapers and magazines (FAZ, Zeit, Süddeutsche, Spektrum der Wissenschaft and EMMA) as well as by a Science perspective article written by Melina Schuh, a Developmental Cell preview article by Michael A. Lampson and a Dispatch in Current Biology article by Marie-Hélène Verlhac. The relevance of our findings for reproductive medicine is furthermore reflected by its influence on ethical discussions especially in Germany. In this context Reichmann et al. was cited in the Leopoldina (German Academy of Science) recommendation for a new law for reproductive medicine presented to the German government in 2021 (https://www.leopoldina.org/uploads/tx_leopublication/2021_Stellungnahme_Embryonenschutz_web.pdf).