Scientists have created baby mice with two fathers for the first time by turning male mouse stem cells into female cells in a lab.
This raises the distant possibility of doing the same for people – although experts caution that very few mouse embryos were born alive and no one knows whether the same technique would work in human stem cells.
Still, “It’s a very clever strategy that’s been developed for converting male stem cells to female stem cells,” said Diana Laird, a stem cell and reproductive expert at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the research. “It’s an important step in both stem cell and reproductive biology.”
Scientists described their work in a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
First, they took skin cells from the tails of male mice and transformed them into “induced pluripotent stem cells,” which can develop into many different types of cells or tissues. Then, through a process that involved growing them and treating them with a drug, they converted male mouse stem cells into female cells and produced functional egg cells. Finally, they fertilized those eggs and implanted the embryos into female mice. About 1% of the embryos – 7 out of 630 – grew into live mouse pups.
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