study published Wednesday<\/a> in the journal Nature.<\/p>\nFirst, they took skin cells from the tails of male mice and transformed them into \u201cinduced pluripotent stem cells,\u201d 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 \u2013 7 out of 630 \u2013 grew into live mouse pups.<\/p>\n
The pups appeared to grow normally and were able to become parents themselves in the usual way, research leader Katsuhiko Hayashi of Kyushu University and Osaka University in Japan told fellow scientists at the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing last week.<\/p>\n
In a commentary published alongside the Nature study, Laird and her colleague, Jonathan Bayerl, said the work \u201copens up new avenues in reproductive biology and fertility research” for animals and people. Down the road, for example, it might be possible to reproduce endangered mammals from a single male.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd it might even provide a template for enabling more people,\u201d such as male same-sex couples, \u201cto have biological children, while circumventing the ethical and legal issues of donor eggs,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n
But they raised several cautions. The most notable one? The technique is extremely inefficient. They said it’s unclear why only a tiny fraction of the embryos placed into surrogate mice survived; the reasons could be technical or biological. They also stressed that it\u2019s still too early to know if the protocol would work in human stem cells at all.<\/p>\n
Laird also said scientists need to be mindful of the mutations and errors that may be introduced in a culture dish before using stem cells to make eggs.<\/p>\n
The research is the latest to test new ways to create mouse embryos in the lab. Last summer, scientists in California and Israel created \u201csynthetic\u201d mouse embryos from stem cells without a dad\u2019s sperm or a mom\u2019s egg or womb. Those embryos mirrored natural mouse embryos up to 8 \u00bd days after fertilization, containing the same structures, including one like a beating heart. Scientists said the feat could eventually lay the foundation for creating synthetic human embryos for research in the future.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute\u2019s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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\n By LAURA UNGAR, AP Science Writer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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 \u2013 although experts caution that very few mouse embryos were born alive and no one knows whether the same technique would<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":618808,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2904,536,3807],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-618807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-create","category-science-nature","category-scientists"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}