The mouse yolk sac

Placenta Volume 36 Issue 10 October 2015

Great to see yolk sacs on the front cover of Placenta. Too often the mouse yolk sac is discarded or ignored in the laboratory - either through ignorance or because it has no obvious equivalent in human pregnancy. This particular study showed how mouse deficient in the OGA gene have defective blood vessel formation (vasculogenesis). This affected branching of the blood vessels in the yolk sac.

Ignorance of the yolk sac is evidenced by a high impact journal publishing a schematic where mouse yolk sac is shown to be only residual as occurs in humans (here).

I believe the mouse model of placentation is incomplete unless the yolk sac is studied along with the chorioallantoic placenta (argued here).