Mouse Skin Cells Transformed Into Viable Eggs, Sperm And Babies
Lab Mouse with Pups A chimeric lab mouse with her pups. These were not the mice used in the study below. Transgenic Core Facility at the National Institute of Mental Health A similar treatment for infertile human couples is still decades off. You may have begun as a spark in your parents' eyes, but in the Kyoto University lab of Katsuhiko Hayashi and Mitinori Saitou, baby mice begin life as… skin cells. After a decade of work, the two biologists have developed a way to turn mice's skin cells into "pre-egg" and "pre-sperm" cells of sorts, Nature reports. The cells are actually called primordial germ cells, with "germ" here meaning eggs and sperm, not germs like the ones you wash off your hands after going to the bathroom. Once implanted in the testes of infertile adult mice, the primordial germ cells turn into sperm that allow the mice to father healthy-seeming pups. When implanted...