Plenary Lecture 3

The germ cell lineage ensures the creation of new individuals, thereby perpetuating the genomic and epigenetic information across the generations. During germ cell development, biologically significant events such as meiosis and gametogenesis are tightly controlled and disorder of the events causes infertility and developmental arrest of the next generation. Generation of gametes from mouse pluripotent stem cells, such as embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), in culture is a key goal in developmental and reproductive biology. Such a culture system will provide a unique platform for elucidating the molecular mechanisms underlying gametogenesis. More practically, it may be an indefinite source for reproduction and preservation of animals. We recently established a culture system that induces functional mouse primordial germ cells (PGCs), origin of eggs and sperm, from ESCs/iPSCs. PGCs produced from ESCs/iPSCs are fully potent, since they differentiated into eggs and sperm by transplantation into ovary and testis, respectively, which in turn gave rise to healthy pups. Furthermore, we recently developed a culture system that reconstitutes the entire process of oogenesis from mouse pluripotent stem cells, yielding in vitro-generated eggs that gave rise to healthy offspring. In the lecture, I will introduce recent advances in reconstitution of germ cell development using ESCs/iPSCs, update current experiments to address molecular mechanisms underlying oogenesis and discuss a future direction of this technology. The 66th Annual Meeting of Japanese Association for Laboratory Animal Science