Unfertilized Eggs Might Produce Stem Cells
Posted on: Tuesday, 20 February 2007, 12:00 CST
Japanese researchers said human eggs from fertilization clinics that would otherwise be discarded might be capable of producing embryonic stem cells.
The finding, which is based on work in mice cells, could provide a way around some of the ethical quandaries surrounding therapeutic cloning and embryonic stem cell research, said researchers from the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology.
During human in vitro fertilization, a proportion of egg cells, or oocytes, fail to become fertilized and are often discarded. But experiments with mice oocytes that did not become fertilized showed that they could still give rise to embryonic stem cells after their nucleus was removed and replaced by a nucleus from a different cell, the RIKEN researchers report in the Feb. 20 issue of Current Biology.
None of the resultant mouse embryos was capable of developing to full term.
Source: United Press International
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Posted by Thomas Friedl on 02/20/2007, 16:08 Stojkovic et al. had tested NT into human oocytes that had failed to become fertilized (Reproductive BioMedicine Online; Vol 11. No 2. 2005 226–231; June 2005), using donor karyoplast from undifferentiated cells from a human embryonic stem cell line. None of these NT zygotes cleaved, none developed to the blastocyst stage, and therefore, no stem cells could have been harvested, of course. In 2006 Stojkovic (Hall et al., Human Reproduction Vol.22, No.1 pp. 52–62, 2007) tested SCNT into human failed-to-fertilize oocytes both from IVF and ICSI using donor nuclei from a 'fibroblast-like' cell line derived from a hESC. No cleavage observed, no blastocyst, no stem cells harvested. Actual SOMATIC cell nuclear transfer might make things even harder. It would be a surprise if the present findings in mice were applicable to human SCNT. Mice may be different. |
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