Extended Data Fig. 2: Validation of RNA-seq data in human early embryos.

a, Microscopy images of human 2PN and 3PN embryos at the zygote, two-cell, four-cell, eight-cell and blastocyst stages. ICSI was used to avoid the cumulus cell contamination. High-quality score embryos were selected for subsequent study (represented by magnified images). b, Heat maps showing gene expression levels for differentially expressed genes between human embryos of pre-lineage segregation and post-lineage specification⁴⁴. Expression of ICMs in this study is also shown for two replicates. Epi, epiblast, PrE, primitive endoderm. c, Bar charts showing the Spearman correlation between the two replicates of RNA-seq samples. d, Hierarchical clustering of RNA-seq datasets from this study (using Smart-seq) and previous studies^22,23 (using a different mRNA-seq method⁴⁵). Pearson correlation was used to measure distances. Different colours represent various stages.