Japanese scientists have made viable mouse eggs in a laboratory dish, an advance that may offer a new route for treating infertility in people. The experiment completes a long-sought quest in reproductive biology: to make sperm and eggs in a lab dish. A year ago, the same core group of scientists at Kyoto University created healthy mouse sperm in the lab.
In the latest experiment, the dish-created eggs were fertilized with natural mouse sperm to create healthy, fertile mice. The research appears in the journal Science. Making mouse eggs "was a little harder to do," said Katsuhiko Hayashi, the lead author of the Science paper. Unlike sperm, he said, egg cells are "big and fragile, and they get mature only after a long, complex process."
It will be even tougher to repeat the trick in people. But if it can ever be done, it has the potential to transform reproductive medicine by enabling both infertile men and women to conceive their own genetic offspring. Read more >>
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