The transition of maternal to zygotic gene expression regulation is critical for human pre-implantation embryo development. Recent years, single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) had been applied to detect the factors that regulate human oocyte maturation and early embryo development. Here the evaluation of transcriptomes by scRNA-seq in the single blastomeres from the embryo collected from patients was performed. There were 20 blastomeres biopsied from 8-cell embryos of seven patients who received more than two ART cycles due to low embryo quality. Meanwhile, ten cells were collected from 8-cell embryos of four patients who received ART treatment due to male factor or tubal factor. The blastomeres were then evaluated using the previously established scRNA-seq method to determine the associations between the gene expression and its developmental competence. The total number of genes detected in 8-cell embryos that failed to form blastocyst including both maternal and zygotic mRNAs were reduced. There were 324 differently expressed genes detected among the 8-cell embryos including 65 genes that were significantly suppressed in the 8-cell embryos failed to form blastocyst. Further analyze found these 8-cell embryos arrested at cleavage stage due to the dysfunction of cell cycle, DNA transcription activity, histone methylation and cell division related genes such as SMCO-1, ZNF271P, ZNF679, ASF1b, BEX3, DPPA2 and ORC4. The alterations of gene expression detected in human 8-cell embryo are tightly associated with its developmental competence and could be used as targets to enhance embryo development or parameters to predict embryo’s development outcomes.