First cleavage signatures define a temporal trade-off and predict embryo fitness
Daphne Norma Crasta, Si Won Lee, Jolene Fredrickson, Theodore Trejo, Nadeem Ghani Khan, Shama Prasada Kabekkodu, Satish Kumar Adiga, Yulian Zhao, Guruprasad Kalthur, Nagarajan Kannan · 2026
Read First cleavage signatures define a temporal trade-off and predict embryo fitness by Daphne Norma Crasta, Si Won Lee, Jolene Fredrickson, Theodore Trejo, Nadeem Ghani Khan, Shama Prasada Kabekkodu, Satish Kumar Adiga, Yulian Zhao, Guruprasad Kalthur, Nagarajan Kannan (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13578430.txt.
Description
Daphne Crasta and co-authors grade the first split of an embryo in a 2026 study. Early embryos vary a lot in how their first cleavage goes, and links to later growth were unclear. Mouse embryos, both fertilized and artificially activated, are filmed over time. A grading scale rates symmetry, fragmentation, and axis correction.
Faulty first splits trace to shaky cell scaffolds, lingering bridges, and lagging chromosomes, they find. A trade-off appears: a longer first cleavage pairs with a shorter next interval, and that pattern predicts quality. Over a thousand human embryos show the same states and timing pattern, with links to later form but not to chromosome faults.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Daphne Norma Crasta, Si Won Lee, Jolene Fredrickson, Theodore Trejo, Nadeem Ghani Khan, Shama Prasada Kabekkodu, Satish Kumar Adiga, Yulian Zhao, Guruprasad Kalthur, Nagarajan Kannan |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 64 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |