For postdoc Xi Chen, a chicken is more than just an egg’s way of making another egg

USC postdoctoral researcher Xi Chen knows that you have to break a few eggs in order to grow chicken stem cells. His work on maintaining embryonic stem cells (ESC) from chicken eggs provides insight into stem cell pluripotency and evolutionary developmental biology.

“The choice of beginning with fertilized chicken eggs was critical to the success of my research because they are easy to get from a farm. It took more than 5,000 fertilized eggs to develop an optimal environment for maintaining chicken ESCs [in the lab],” said Chen, who works in Qi-Long Ying’s lab in the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC.

Chen hopes that his research will lead to applications in other avian species such as quail or geese. Quail ESCs could be useful in the lab due to their shorter maturation times and smaller size compared with chicken ESCs. Further applications could extend to developing laboratory-generated food lines. In addition, comparing ESCs from a variety of birds could shed light on their biological diversity, and create future potential for reviving extinct or repopulating endangered species.