Fatherless mouse born

I have already post about cloning some time ago and now seems that scientist manage to born mouse without a father. News sometimes shocks me Shocked

Quote

Scientists in Japan have coaxed mouse eggs to grow into apparently healthy mice without being fertilized first by sperm, marking the first creation of mammals from individual egg cells without any contribution from a father.

The advance, described in a report being published today, is the latest in a series of reproductive innovations that, in laboratories at least, have begun to make old-fashioned sexual procreation seem quaint.

The feat does not suggest that men will soon become irrelevant for human reproduction. The extreme genetic manipulations used by the team are, for now at least, technically and ethically unfeasible in humans.

But experts said the work breaks important ground by decoding the biological signaling system that tells a developing embryo whether it has received DNA from both a mother and father -- normally a requirement for mammals -- and shows how that system can be circumvented.

If simpler techniques emerge, humans may someday gain the option that some insects, lizards, amphibians and other animals already have: parthenogenesis, or the direct and unassisted production of daughters from mothers.

"It's probably not an insurmountable problem," said Harvard biologist David Haig. "Then you're faced with the issue of, 'Is this something you want to do?' "

The new work, led by Tomohiro Kono, a developmental biologist at Tokyo University of Agriculture, focused on a mysterious aspect of mammalian reproduction called genomic imprinting. In that process, which takes place inside developing eggs and sperm, tiny molecules attach themselves to certain genes and effectively turn those genes off. Through a mechanism that remains poorly understood, different genes are shut down in sperm than in eggs.

Because a full set of working genes is needed for development, pairs of eggs or pairs of sperm cannot grow into new animals. Only when egg and sperm join forces will a young embryo have just the right collection of working and non-working genes.

Scientists want to understand the process because some diseases are caused by faulty imprinting. Others want to make human embryos by parthenogenesis as sources of medically useful stem cells.

this is the source of article: http://www.startribune.com/stories/1556/4735843.html