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posted by chromas on Friday October 12 2018, @04:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the trials-and-tribadism dept.

Rewriting reproduction: With stem cells and CRISPR, scientists breed mice with same-sex parents

For the first time, scientists said Thursday that they had bred mice with two genetic fathers, steering around biological hurdles that would otherwise prevent same-sex parents from having offspring. The researchers also bred mouse pups with two genetic mothers. Those pups matured into adults and had pups of their own, outpacing previous efforts to create so-called bimaternal mice. [...] The cells used to make the mouse embryos were profoundly manipulated. The vast majority of the embryos made did not result in births. And none of the bipaternal mouse pups — those with two genetic fathers — survived to adulthood.

[...] At issue is "genomic imprinting," an evolutionary feature found in mammals (and also flowering plants) that researchers believe blocks these species from producing progeny without both maternal and paternal DNA. In our genomes, there are two copies of each gene — one from mom, one from dad — and both get expressed to make us us. But there are some 100 genes where "imprints" stationed along the genome signal one copy to be active and one to be silent. "The other copy is there and it's presented and there's nothing wrong with the DNA sequence," said Manus Patten, an evolutionary biologist at Georgetown University, who was not part of the new research. "It's just turned off." Mammals still need both sets, though, to have their full suite of genetic instructions. IGF2, for example, is a gene crucial for growth and development, but only the paternal copy is normally active. If we just inherited DNA maternally then, we wouldn't grow or develop properly; that gene would simply remain off. On the flip side, there are a number of these genes for which we rely on our mothers.

But scientists started challenging nature's way a decade and a half ago. The trick was to cajole certain maternal genes to act like paternal genes in terms of their activity, or vice versa. In 2004, a team of Japanese researchers for the first time created mice [DOI: 10.1038/nature02402] [DX] with two mothers by toying with imprint signals, though only one of the 10 mice born in that study — out of more than 400 embryos — grew to adulthood. To try to improve on past results, the researchers in the new study manipulated imprint instructions even more extensively.

Today, it's a proof of concept. Tomorrow, it will be refined.

Also at BBC and Popular Science.

Generation of Bimaternal and Bipaternal Mice from Hypomethylated Haploid ESCs with Imprinting Region Deletions (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.stem.2018.09.004) (DX)


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  • (Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @05:49PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @05:49PM (#747981)

    Ok, here I go…

    I have mixed feelings about this. I am impressed by what they have achieved, but at the same time, I can't help but feel that humans really don't need more ways of making humans staying alive. Our population growth is already quite high…

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 14 2018, @03:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 14 2018, @03:05AM (#748481)

    I guess this was a bit too subtle for some ¯\_(ツ)_/¯