Genetic
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Japanese researchers have managed to give birth to seven mice resulting from the fertilization of two male cells and a female carrier. Described as “revolutionary”, this experiment raises ethical questions.
This is the news that agitates the scientific community and poses new ethical questions. A team of Japanese researchers managed to give birth to seven young mice resulting from the fertilization of two male cells. So they have two fathers and a surrogate mother, so to speak. Katsuhiko Hayashi, from Kyushu University, presented his work at a conference in London in early March, and were published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
The team took skin cells from the tail of an adult mouse, a cell that contains the genetic information needed to develop into a whole individual, but it can only express this potential in the right context. They treated them to transform them into pluripotent stem cells.
Then he managed to make these cells female, that is to say make them lose their Y chromosome and replace it with an X chromosome to have a pair of XX sex chromosomes. After a certain period of culture, the loss of the Y chromosome was spontaneous in 6% of cases. The researchers subjected these cells to a treatment with reversin, a molecule that causes mismatches during cell reproduction, until XX cells appear.
The researchers repeated the operation 630 times
We therefore have a female pluripotent cell obtained from a male skin cell. A feat. But this is insufficient. It remained to transform this cell into an egg