Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 09 2018, @09:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-do-you-like-your-eggs?-unfertilized dept.

Scientists have coaxed primordial follicles from human ovarian tissue into creating apparently mature egg cells, although they have not been fertilized:

In an advance that could lead to new fertility treatments, researchers have coaxed immature human egg cells to fully develop in the lab for the first time. Still unclear is whether the resulting eggs, which reached maturity in just 22 days, compared with 5 months in the body, are normal and whether they can combine with sperm to make a healthy embryo.

The feat nonetheless is "extraordinarily important," says Kyle Orwig, a stem cell biologist at the Magee-Womens Research Institute at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania who was not involved in the new work. "It has real potential for application," he adds. "We already have the patients."

Those patients include women who have gone through chemotherapy, which can damage eggs and cause infertility. Girls with cancer who haven't hit puberty don't yet produce mature eggs that can be frozen, so some choose to preserve a small piece of ovarian tissue, which can later be placed back in the body to start making eggs. But that's a risky choice in some cases, because the transplant could reintroduce the cancer with the cells. If the new process is perfected, these women could instead rely on the tissue they saved as girls to generate eggs for in vitro fertilization.

[...] In the new work, Telfer and her collaborators completed the whole developmental cycle. They took small samples from the ovaries of 10 women undergoing elective caesarian sections, and isolated 87 follicles, which they let develop in a soup of nutrients. Then came a new step: They carefully extracted the fragile, immature eggs and some surrounding cells from the follicles, and allowed them to further mature on a special membrane in the presence of more growth-supporting proteins. In the end, just nine of these eggs passed the final test for maturity [open, DOI: 10.1093/molehr/gay002] [DX]—they were able to divide and halve their chromosomes so they were ready to join with sperm during fertilization, the researchers reported online 30 January in Molecular Human Reproduction.

The next step would be to create the primordial follicles from stem cells or skin cells.

Also at BBC and The Guardian.

Related: Mice Created from Artificially Developed Embryos
Fertile Mouse Eggs Created Using Stem Cells


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by unauthorized on Saturday February 10 2018, @02:48PM (1 child)

    by unauthorized (3776) on Saturday February 10 2018, @02:48PM (#636007)

    In 500 years, humanity will not be making any babies because we'd have finally managed to reset civilization or long transitioned into immortal machine-gods.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday February 10 2018, @03:17PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday February 10 2018, @03:17PM (#636017) Journal

    Runaway chose the baffling +500 year mark, not me. I'd prefer to keep it to 50-100 years and I think these fertility advances (such as two men having a genetic child using an artificial womb) will happen within the next 20-30 years.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]