Evaluate the developmental competence of human 8-cell embryos by single-cell RNA sequencing

作者：Weizhou Wang, Mengmeng Zhao, Haiyang Zuo, Jingyao Zhang, Bin Liu, Fu Chen, Pengyun Ji, Guoshi Liu, Shuai Gao, Wei Shang, Lu Zhang · 发表于：Reproduction and Fertility · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.1530/raf-22-0119 · 被引用次数：9 · 研究领域：Pluripotent Stem Cells Research、Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics、Reproductive Biology and Fertility

Abstract: The transition of maternal to zygotic gene expression regulation is critical for human preimplantation embryo development. In recent years, single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) had been applied to detect the factors that regulate human oocyte maturation and early embryo development. Here, the evaluation of transcriptomes in single blastomere from the embryo collected from patients by scRNA-seq was performed. There were 20 blastomeres biopsied from 8-cell embryos of seven patients who received more than two ART cycles due to low embryo competence. Meanwhile, ten cells were collected from 8-cell embryos of four patients who received ART treatment due to male or tubal factors. The blastomeres were then evaluated using the previously established scRNA-seq method to determine the associations between their gene expression and developmental competence. The total number of genes detected in 8-cell embryos that failed to form blastocyst including maternal and zygotic mRNAs was reduced. There were 324 differently expressed genes detected among the 8-cell embryos including 65 genes that were significantly suppressed in the 8-cell embryos that failed to form blastocyst. Further analysis found these 8-cell embryos arrested at the cleavage stage due to the dysfunction of the cell cycle, DNA transcription activity, histone methylation, and cell division-related genes such as SMCO-1, ZNF271P,ZNF679, ASF1b, BEX3, DPPA2, and ORC4. The alterations of gene expression detected in hum...