Development of technologies for the non-invasive assessment of single embryo metabolism and viability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article, which arose from a collaboration between the University of York and Hammersmith Hospital, London (Hardy et al., 1989), was one of the most influential in the first few years of Human Reproduction. It demonstrated that it was possible to analyse the nutrient content of the medium around the human preimplantation embryo throughout its development in culture. This novel research paved the way for several studies which quantified nutrient utilization by single human embryos and related this to their subsequent development and viability; specifically, through detailed analysis of the turnover of amino acids (Ferrick et al., 2020, Houghton et al., 2002) and the uptake of carbohydrates (Ferrick et al., 2020, Gardner et al., 2011); all studies published in Human Reproduction. However, to understand the significance of the 1989 article, it is necessary to explore its origins; specifically, how the foundation was laid by two earlier articles in Human Reproduction. Moreover, to appreciate fully the technology and concepts behind the 1989 article, one needs to go back to 1984 when two articles were published using an ultramicrofluorescence technique developed in the laboratory of Claude Lechene at Harvard Medical School, and adapted to measure nucleotides in single oocytes and embryos by one of us (HJL) on sabbatical in John Biggers’ laboratory, also in Harvard (Leese et al., 1984). Back in the UK (University of York), the method was further modified, with invaluable help from Alison Barton, to measure glucose and pyruvate uptake by in vivo-derived mouse oocytes and embryos (Leese and Barton, 1984). 1984 was of further significance for one of us (DKG), who commenced a DPhil in HJL’s lab, which, unbeknownst to us both, was about to establish a collaboration with Professor Robert (Bob) Edwards.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".