Members | Leducq Fellows
Ayaka Yanagida, DVM, PhD

Ayaka Yanagida, D.V.M., Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Veterinary Anatomy at the University of Tokyo and a Visiting Researcher in the Nakauchi Lab at Institute of Science Tokyo. Her research centers on early mammalian development, with expertise in stem cell culture, embryo micromanipulation, and early embryo analysis. She is one of the first researchers to demonstrate blastoid formation from human naive pluripotent stem cells. Her current work focuses on understanding why human cells fail to integrate into the host epiblast in human-to-mouse chimeric embryos, and on recapitulating this process using embryo models.

Representative publications include:

Yanagida, A., Corujo-Simon, E., Revell, C.K., Sahu, P., Stirparo, G.G., Aspalter, I.M., Winkel, A.K., Peters, R., De Belly, H., Cassani, D.A.D., et al. (2022). Cell surface fluctuations regulate early embryonic lineage sorting. Cell 185, 777-793.e20. go to article 

Yanagida, A., Spindlow, D., Nichols, J., Dattani, A., Smith, A., and Guo, G. (2021). Naive stem cell blastocyst model captures human embryo lineage segregation. Cell Stem Cell 28, 1016-1022.e4. go to article