Fig. 1

Schematic representing the human embryonic stages analysed and transcriptomic comparisons. a) The human embryonic stages analysed. We carried out single embryo and blastomere polyA-PCR global transcriptome profiling on replicate oocytes and embryos at the 4-cell (n = 4), 8-cell (n = 3) and blastocyst (n = 4) stage, together with 8 individual blastomeres disaggregated from one 8-cell embryo, and trophectoderm (n = 4) and inner cell mass (n = 4) disaggregated from blastocysts. We carried out single embryo and blastomere polyA PCR and qPCR on 24 individual blastomeres disaggregated from 3 complete sets. 8 individual blastomeres were used for qPCR validation. b) Different transcriptomic comparisons applied throughout the paper. To determine differences in gene expression between samples ANOVA was performed on 4-cell embryos vs. oocytes, 8-cell embryos and blastocysts. Benjamini-Hochberg false discovery rate (FDR) corrected p-values ≤0.05 were considered differentially expressed. Frozen robust multi-array analysis (fRMA) was used to define absolute expression by comparison to publically available microarray datasets within R and an expression barcode was defined for the 8-cell blastomere, ICM and TE sample