Patchwork placenta

Patchwork placenta Sketch of a placenta. Credit: ilbusca / Getty Images. The traditional view of the placenta is a miraculous, protective, life-giving growth sac. Surprisingly, in a paper published in Nature, a team of researchers from the UK’s Wellcome Sanger Institute and University of Cambridge have shown that the genomic architecture of the placenta is actually much closer to a tumour than a normal organ. The placenta has many traits indicative of tumours, such as cells with different numbers of chromosomes, a large number of tumour-like cell multiplications, and lots of genetic defects. Thankfully, it acts almost like a “dumping ground” for these defects so that the foetus within can avoid many of these errors.