Recently,Dr. Jin Zhang’s lab has published a series of original work about metabolismand nucleolus regulation in early embryo development and in pluripotent stemcell fate decision. These work showed that the functions that conventionallythought as “housekeeping” functions indeed play specific regulatory roles indevelopment and stem cell fate decisions.

OnOctober 14, 2021, Jing Zhao et.al. from Dr. Zhang’s group published Metabolicremodelling during early mouse embryo development at Nature Metabolism.

During early mammalian embryogenesis, changes in cellgrowth and proliferation depend on strict genetic and metabolic instructions.However, our understanding of metabolic reprogramming and its influence onepigenetic regulation in early embryo development remains elusive. Here we showa comprehensive metabolomics profiling of key stages in mouse early developmentand the two-cell and blastocyst embryos, and we reconstructed the metaboliclandscape through the transition from totipotency to pluripotency. Ourintegrated metabolomics and transcriptomics analysis shows that while two-cellembryos favour methionine, polyamine and glutathione metabolism and stay in amore reductive state, blastocyst embryos have higher metabolites related to themitochondrial tricarboxylic acid cycle, and present a more oxidative state.Moreover, we identify a reciprocal relationship between α-ketoglutarate (α-KG) and the competitive inhibitor of α-KG-dependent dioxygenases, L-2-hydroxyglutarate(L-2-HG), where two-cell embryos inherited from oocytes and one-cell zygotesdisplay higher L-2-HG, whereas blastocysts show higher α-KG. Lastly, increasing 2-HG availability impedes erasureof global histone methylation markers after fertilization. Together, our datademonstrate dynamic and interconnected metabolic, transcriptional andepigenetic network remodelling during early mouse embryo development.