Our First Collaborative Paper Published in Cell

We are delighted to share that our first collaborative paper since the lab was established has been published in Cell on 11 June 2026, entitled "Two distinct causes contribute to the low efficiency of human pre-implantation development."

Led by Dr. SU Jun (National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing / Tsinghua University) together with collaborators at CITIC-Xiangya, Beijing Jiayuan Hospital, the Institute of Zoology, CAS, and the Guangdong Institute of Intelligent Medicine, the study used a custom high-throughput, dual-view light-sheet microscope to capture, for the first time, the full first 120 hours of human embryo development in living cells.

By tracking more than 2,000 cleavage events across 150+ human and cynomolgus monkey embryos, the team showed that early (day 1–3) and late (day 4) developmental arrest are driven by two distinct mechanisms: centriole duplication errors that trigger abnormal spindles and chromosome missegregation in the early embryo, and an endoplasmic-reticulum stress response that stalls embryos at the morula stage. The work also points to small-molecule strategies to prevent these failures.

Our contribution

CytoArchiLab applied Expansion Microscopy (ExM) to visualize centrioles of human pre-implantation embryos, supporting the study's analysis of centrosome abnormalities during early cleavage.

Congratulations to all collaborators on this milestone, and we look forward to building on this partnership.