On April 10, 2020, Science published joint results by researchers of Xi'an Jiaotong University, Duke University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. XJTU's researcher Huang Qiang from the Department of Pediatric Surgery, Second Affiliated Hospital of XJTU is the first author.

This research introduced an intravital imaging of embryos. Researchers designed an abdominal window to image mouse embryos in utero from embryonic day 9.5 to birth. They observed neuro transmission and cell division in the brain, autophagy in the retina, viral gene delivery, and placental drug transfer.

The authors wrote,“We combined the imaging window with in utero electroporation to label and track cell division and movement within embryos and observed that clusters of mouse NCC-derived cells expanded in interspecies chimeras, whereas adjacent human donor NCC-derived cells shrank. This technique can be combined with various tissue manipulation and microscopy methods to study the processes of development at unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution.”

Read the article: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6487/181