How do human limbs develop? The first "roadmap" of human limb cell development is released

Sun Yat-sen University recently announced that Zhang Hongbo's research group at the Sun Yat-sen School of Medicine of Sun Yat-sen University published a paper in the journal Nature, releasing the first single-cell spatiotemporal map of human limb development, analyzing the cell evolution path of fetal limbs and the process of determining the spatial position of cells.

This study provides an important reference for further studying the detailed regulatory mechanisms of limb development, the cellular physiological mechanisms of abnormal limb development, and even the cell fate regulation mechanisms and spatial position establishment mechanisms in broader development and regeneration processes.

In this study, Zhang Hongbo's team and collaborators tried to answer two key questions: How is the development of limb cells determined? For example, why do some of the same cells later become fiber cells and some become part of the skeleton? How is the spatial position of cells determined? For example, why does a normally developed hand have five fingers, and why is the direction of the thumb different from the other four fingers?

Zhang Hongbo took samples continuously from the beginning of the fifth week to the ninth week of the embryo, obtaining more than 100,000 cells, with approximately 2,000 genes in each cell. Through computational analysis, the team was the first to construct a detailed single-cell map of human limb development that includes all cell types.

Zhang Bao, co-first author of the paper and a postdoctoral fellow in Zhang Hongbo's team, introduced that using this map, one can intuitively track the cell types produced at specific times and regions, identify new cell types, and characterize the key genes activated by different types of cells.

"Dysplasia of the limbs is one of the most commonly reported birth syndromes in the world, with one case found in approximately every 500 newborns worldwide." Zhang Hongbo pointed out that the atlas depicts normal limb development and provides a time and space "roadmap" of normal cell evolution. In this way, it can help discover the causes and time of limb development abnormalities, providing a basis for the next step of medical intervention.

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Source: Xinhua News Agency

Editor: Zhong Yanping