Lab-Made Eggs Produce Healthy Mice 81
ananyo writes "Japanese researchers have coaxed mouse stem cells into becoming viable eggs that produce healthy offspring. Last year, the same team successfully used mouse stem cells to make functional sperm (other groups have produced sperm cells in vitro). The researchers used a cocktail of growth factors to transform stem cells into egg precursors. When they added these egg precursor cells to embryonic ovary tissue that did not contain sex cells, the mixture spontaneously formed ovary-like structures, which they then grafted onto natural ovaries in female mice. After four weeks, the stem-cell-derived cells had matured into oocytes. The team removed the oocytes from the ovaries, fertilized them and transplanted the embryos into foster mothers. The offspring that were produced grew up to be fertile themselves."
Einstein Tesla Baby (Score:3, Insightful)
Lab Notes: August 12, 2023
Einsla is becoming a remarkable young woman. She speaks 29 languages and has built 7 helper bots from spare parts found around the lab. She even re-engineered her iPhone 15 to send tweets telepathically. Who'd a thunk that stem cell eggs and sperm would be so friggin dope?
Lab ntes : Octobre 54, bleh
Einsla is all-powerful. I must obey. farble-blerp. please get out of my mind. [end of transcript]
Re:New cloning technique. (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't result in a clone.
Re:And we move forward (Score:4, Insightful)
If the robots can build a colony why waste time building human colonists?
Just have robotic colonists.
Re:New cloning technique. (Score:2, Insightful)
It's actually way worse than cloning. It's much more like a super inbreeding. You're taking 1/2 the DNA and combining it with the same DNA. All of your homogenous dominant and recessive traits become the same, but with the same as any inbreeding, any recessive gene based disease you were a "carrier" for you automatically have a 25% of introducing full on into the offspring. There is an incredibly slight chance that you do end up with a clone if you pull the correctly matched half of each chromosome from each sperm and egg and join them.