Release date: 2016-09-20
For the first time, scientists have succeeded in cultivating mice without fertilized eggs. This result has a great impact on endangered species with very few females, and one day humans will also be affected.
The experiment done by embryologists at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom also means that the status of egg cells in reproduction may not be as important as we think. The team believes that simple things like skin cells may replace egg cells.
Team member Tony Perry said: "This is the first time we have injected sperm into the embryo to produce a complete mouse. Our research challenges the embryonic scientists' long-standing tradition that only egg cells can be combined with sperm cells to give birth to live lactation. animal."
The success of this experiment not only challenges the view that the fertilized egg can develop into a complete life, but also shows that not only the egg cell can adapt the sperm, so that the embryo can develop.
Prior to this, no one has been able to demonstrate that other types of cells can be combined with sperm cells to produce offspring, and the research team has made it possible to combine other cells with sperm cells by confirming the errors of traditional claims.
Perry said: "We are talking about different ways of making embryos. Imagine you can use skin cells to combine with sperm cells to produce embryos? It has many uses."
In experimental China, Perry and his team extracted unfertilized egg cells from female mice and tried to induce them as “pseudo-embryosâ€, which is called parthenogenesis.
Previous studies have shown that if unfertilized mouse eggs are exposed to the salt of strontium chloride (SrCl2), they can be induced to differentiate into daughter cells as if they had been fertilized by sperm cells. In certain reptiles, these parthenogenetic embryos can develop into healthy offspring without the need for males; but in mammals, they never survive, and usually die within a few days.
The researchers decided to understand how the spermatozoa could survive a few days if they were injected into newly differentiated daughter cells.
So they injected the embryos into the female mice and found that they gave birth to 30 mice with a success rate of 24%. So far, these little mice are very healthy. Some little mice even have their own offspring, and their offspring are also very healthy.
Now you must be curious as to what is new here, because this is not to make small babies with eggs and sperm. The key problem is that the daughter cells produced by parthenogenetic embryos are completely different from the daughter cells produced by fertilized eggs.
Andy Coghlan said: "Unlike ordinary egg cells, they are able to differentiate into new cells, which makes them more like other cells in the body, such as the skin."
The team next plans to use the same process, but this time replace the unfertilized egg cells with skin cells to see if there are similar results.
Perry said: "Can we do it? I don't know. But I think that if it is possible, then in the distant future, when humans look back, it will be said that this is where everything starts."
Of course, the possibility of using human sperm cells and skin cells to make human babies or applying this method to mammals with only a few individuals is very attractive, but at present we don't know if this method can be used outside of mice. The animal works.
We can only wait, but at least if one day all the female mice decide to quit, then we are ready for the alternative. The study was published in Nature News.
Source: Omelette Net
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