Human 8-cell-like cells discovered

Human naive pluripotent stem cells have the remarkable ability to generate blastoids comprising trophectoderm, epiblast, and hypoblast-like cells. In this issue, Taubenschmid-Stowers et al. (2022) show that human naive pluripotent stem cell cultures contain cells that resemble the 8-cell human embryo, providing a model to study zygotic genome activation.