Now, Jiajia Ye at the Chinese Academy of Science and his colleagues have uncovered how an embryo can tell when to stall development. They put 14 newly pregnant mice in a cage with food and 11 ...

IMAGE CAPTION: A mouse embryo (blastocyst) that has paused its development due to nutrient depletion. Image credit: Jiajia Ye. REFERENCE: Jiajia Ye, Yuting Xu, Qi Ren, Lu liu and Qiang Sun (2024).

After fresh embryo transfer, the blastocyst group showed a higher live birth rate (risk ratio [RR], 1.26; 95 percent confidence interval [CI], 1.00 to 1.58), lower cumulative pregnancy loss rate ...

At some point in our evolution, we lost the ability to activate a reproductive mechanism called embryonic diapause, which slows development, usually during the blastocyst stage. And so, unlike ...