Fig. 1From: Systems based analysis of human embryos and gene networks involved in cell lineage allocationSchematic representing the human embryonic stages analysed and transcriptomic comparisons. a) The human embryonic stages analysed. We carried out single embryo and blastomere polyA-PCR global transcriptome profiling on replicate oocytes and embryos at the 4-cell (n = 4), 8-cell (n = 3) and blastocyst (n = 4) stage, together with 8 individual blastomeres disaggregated from one 8-cell embryo, and trophectoderm (n = 4) and inner cell mass (n = 4) disaggregated from blastocysts. We carried out single embryo and blastomere polyA PCR and qPCR on 24 individual blastomeres disaggregated from 3 complete sets. 8 individual blastomeres were used for qPCR validation. b) Different transcriptomic comparisons applied throughout the paper. To determine differences in gene expression between samples ANOVA was performed on 4-cell embryos vs. oocytes, 8-cell embryos and blastocysts. Benjamini-Hochberg false discovery rate (FDR) corrected p-values ≤0.05 were considered differentially expressed. Frozen robust multi-array analysis (fRMA) was used to define absolute expression by comparison to publically available microarray datasets within R and an expression barcode was defined for the 8-cell blastomere, ICM and TE sampleBack to article page