Researchers discovered a potential “pause button” in the earliest stages of human development. This state -embryonic diapause- is characterized by reduced cell division, slower development, and a decreased ability to attach to the uterine lining, and is restricted to a brief developmental period

To be honest, I understood very little about this intricate article. If someone can explain it in understandable words, that would be great…

>Now, a study by the labs of Nicolas Rivron at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, an ERC grantee, and of Aydan Bulut-Karslıoğlu at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin has identified that the molecular mechanisms that control embryonic diapause also seem to be actionable in human cell

>The researchers discovered that modulation of a specific molecular cascade, the mTOR signaling pathway, in these stem cell models induces a dormant state remarkably akin to diapause. “The mTOR pathway is a major regulator of growth and developmental progression in mouse embryos”, says Aydan Bulut-Karslioglu. “When we treated human stem cells and blastoids with an mTOR inhibitor we observed a developmental delay, which means that human cells can deploy the molecular machinery to elicit a diapause-like response.”
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>This dormant state is characterized by reduced cell division, slower development and a decreased ability to attach to the uterine lining. Importantly, the capacity to enter this dormant stage seems to be restricted to a brief developmental period. “The developmental timing of blastoids can be stretched around the blastocyst stage, which is exactly the stage where diapause works in most mammals,” says co-first author Dhanur P. Iyer. Moreover, this dormancy is reversible, and blastoids resume normal development when the mTOR pathway is reactivated.
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>The authors concluded that humans, like other mammals, might possess an inherent mechanism to temporarily slow down their development, even though this mechanism may not be used during pregnancy. “This potential may be a vestige of the evolutionary process that we no longer make use of,” says Nicolas Rivron. “Although we have lost the ability to naturally enter dormancy, these experiments suggest that we have nevertheless retained this inner ability and could eventually unleash it.” For basic research, the question arises as to whether human and other mammalian cells enter the dormant state via similar or alternative pathways and use it for the same purposes, for example either pausing or timing their development and implantation.

Paper: [mTOR activity paces human blastocyst stage developmental progression: Cell](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00977-2?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867424009772%3Fshowall%3Dtrue)