A
human blastocyst refers to the early stage of human development after fertilization. It is a cluster of cells that forms about 5-6 days after the union of a sperm and an egg.
Full definition
Paper on creation of stem cell line
from human blastocyst contains fabricated data, university committee concludes
Though science has been trying to
make human blastocysts, the embryonic stage at which stem cells can be harvested till now, the de-nucleated egg approach has not worked in humans.
The first reports of the generation of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) from fibroblasts [1, 2] were greeted with great enthusiasm over their ability to mimic the properties and function of embryonic stem cells without entailing the ethical controversies and resourcing issues associated with the use
of human blastocysts in derivation.
Embryonic stem cells derived
from human blastocysts have the key advantage of pluripotency, meaning that they form nearly all cell types but also have the disadvantage of forming tumors in vivo, which may limit clinical application to tissue engineering rather than cell transplantation.
They know enough to realise that it's very different in humans, as Nichols explained: «Pluripotent cells that seem very similar to the mouse naive pluripotent cells appear in
the human blastocyst before implantation but we don't know what happens to those cells for the following week of development.