Mouse Caviar - by Metacelsus - De Novo

Caviar is considered a luxury food, fetching up to hundreds of dollars per ounce for the most exclusive grades. But if you think caviar is expensive, consider that human eggs cost around $3,000 each at the low end, and much higher if you want to use a donor with good genetics. Recently, Mitinori Saitou’s lab at Kyoto University published a paper (Nosaka et al., Developmental Cell 2025)1 describing a method to mass-produce mouse eggs from stem cells, at up to 400,000 eggs per batch. Although the eggs are low-quality and cannot reach a fully mature stage, this is still a remarkable advance. Surprisingly, this method works without ovarian supporting cells, and this has important implications for in vitro meiosis and in vitro oogenesis. The basic approach is as follows: Starting from mouse pluripotent stem cells, differentiate them to primordial germ cell-like cells (PGCLCs) through treatment with signaling factors. Take the PGCLCs and culture them on m220-5 feeder cells, which promote cel

Caviar is considered a luxury food, fetching up to hundreds of dollars per ounce for the most exclusive grades. But if you think caviar is expensive, consider that human eggs cost around $3,000 each at the low end, and much higher if you want to use a donor with good genetics. Recently, Mitinori Saitou’s lab at Kyoto University published a paper (Nosaka et al., Developmental Cell 2025)1 describing a method to mass-produce mouse eggs from stem cells, at up to 400,000 eggs per batch. Although the eggs are low-quality and cannot reach a fully mature stage, this is still a remarkable advance. Surp