The mouse is born from two parents, without females

Understand work mother cells this has led science to great advances in areas such as regenerative medicine. But that is not all. Now, thanks to a study published in Naturewe know that in the future they can be used to obtain embryos with only two parents.

In this case they got mice without my intervention no female at fertilization. They used sperm obtained from male mice and eggs obtained from stem cells, also from male mice. This is a historic milestone that has been achieved with very little efficiency; but even so, it opens interesting doors.

It is believed that in the future he may have many useful applications for people. But we have to go step by step. In the meantime, we must increase the efficiency they have achieved with mice. There are reasons for optimism, but without taking your feet off the ground.

Baby mice from two parents thanks to stem cells

Mice, like humans, have two possible biological sexes. cells with XY sex chromosomes refer to men, and persons with XX chromosomes They are called female.

Typically, the gametes or sex cells of XY individuals are spermwhile those with XX cells are egg. These scientists, however, wanted to see if stem cells could be used to convert those XYs into XXs.

To do this, they took cells from male mice and turned them into iPS cells. That is stem cells of induced pluripotency, according to the English abbreviation. This is the mechanism by which you can take an adult or differentiated cell and restore pluripotency so it can transform into any cell type.

Once they got those cells, were grown in the laboratorywaiting for them to make mistakes in the process of cell division. This is common and usually dangerous, but in this case, if done in a controlled way, it can be beneficial. So it was. They saw that when they made mistakes, some of them lost their Y chromosome. X0 cells. All that remained was that when they replicated, they doubled that chromosome. Even this can be forced by exposing cells to a drug called flips.

In this way they got XX stem cells, still pluripotent. Since they could transform into any type of cell, they were sent to transform into eggs, which would later be fertilized with mouse sperm.

Few mice, but very promising results

In general, these scholars 630 eggs were fertilized.which were later implanted into the uterus of mice. only 7 were born, so the efficiency is about 1%. It doesn’t seem like much, but at least one hurdle that hasn’t been hit so far has been overcome.

It’s still too early to know if this can be extrapolated to humans. However, if it could, the study authors believe it could have two main uses. On the one hand, it would help women with Turner syndromewhose cells are exactly X0, with one X chromosome. On the other hand, it might help couples formed by two men have children belonging to both. However, here, too, the need for a female uterus would still exist, so one would have to resort to surrogate bellieswith all the negativity that this entails ethically.

So it’s too early to run the bells on the fly. These scientists have shown that the technology is possible. What seems like science fiction can be done in the laboratory. In addition, much more research will need to be done and conditions adjusted to make it safe and ethical. Babies of two parents are still a long way off, but what they’ve achieved with these mice is impressive.