Aggregation recovers developmental plasticity in mouse polyploid embryos

Abstract

Polyploidy is comparatively prevalent in amphibians and fishes, but is infrequent in animals because of lethality after implantation. On the contrary, tetraploid embryos normally develop into blastocysts, and embryonic stem cells can be established from tetraploid blastocysts in mice. Thus, polyploidization does not seem to be so harmful during preimplantation development. However, the mechanisms by which early mammalian development accepts polyploidization are still poorly understood. In this study, we aimed to elucidate the effect of polyploidization on early mammalian development and to further comprehend its tolerability using hyperpolyploid embryos produced by artificial, repetitive whole genome duplication. Therefore, we successfully established several types of polyploid embryos (tetraploid, octaploid, and hexadecaploid), produced using repeated electrofusion of two-cell embryos in mice, and studied their developmental potential in vitro. We demonstrated that all types of these polyploid embryos maintained the ability to develop to the blastocyst stage, which implies that mammalian cells might have basic cellular functions in implanted embryos, despite polyploidization. However, the inner cell mass was absent in the hexadecaploid blastocysts. To complement the total cells in blastocysts, a fused hexadecaploid embryo was produced by aggregating a number of hexadecaploid embryos. The results indicated that the fused hexadecaploid embryo finally recovered pluripotent cells in blastocysts. Thus, our findings suggested that early mammalian embryos may have the tolerability and higher plasticity to adapt to hyperpolyploidization for blastocyst formation, despite intense alteration of the genome volume.