The people behind the papers – Wendy Duan and Meghan Riddell

As the human placenta forms, progenitor villous cytotrophoblasts (vCTs) undergo cell fusion to produce a multinucleate cell called the syncytiotrophoblast (ST). When this process goes wrong, it can lead to conditions such as pre-eclampsia. However, little is known about the mechanisms underpinning vCT fusion. A new paper in Development demonstrates that the formation of microvilli on the apical surface of vCTs is crucial for fusion and the formation of the ST. To learn more about the story behind the paper, we caught up with first author Wendy Duan and corresponding author Meghan Riddell, Associate Professor at the University of Alberta, Canada.