Chinese researchers create rats from two biological mothers.

With the help of a new method of genetic engineering, scientists in China have caused the birth of healthy babies using it The DNA of two parents in equal gender. Born without defect, fatherless rats developed normally and continued to produce healthy offspring.

“We were interested in why mammals can only submit to sexual reproduction”, said Qi Zhou, researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in a press release. “We tried to find out if normal rats with two female parents, or even two male parents, could be produced using stem cells of space embryos with the removal of genes”.

A genetic mechanism called genomic pressure enables sexual reproduction in mammals but prevents the reproduction of the same gender. By silenced the specific genes, genomic pressure helps genetic material to the eggs and sperm to combine effectively.

But when DNAs from mother and father are not present, the genomic printing mechanism prevents the genetic recombination process, which can cause abnormalities and developmental defects.

Scientists have previously produced offspring from two female mice, erasing printed genomic genes.

However, the generated mice still have damaged traits, and the method itself is very unrealistic and difficult to use”, Jou said.

Jou and his colleagues developed a new technique using stem cells of space embryos, stem cells with half the usual number of chromosomes. Stelloid stem cells represent half the number of printed genome genes.

We found in this study that the ESC was more similar to the primary embryo cells, the eggs' predecessors and sperm cells. The genomic pressure found on the gamma was included”, said researcher Baoyang Hu.

Scientists put modified eSCs into normal mouse eggs, producing embryos, which were implanted into the surrogacy mice. The experiment was successful, but non-efficial 209 embryos produced 29 healthy babies. Efforts to produce two-father mice produced two babies out of 500 embryos but both died within 48 hours.

Researchers describe their experiments Thursday in Cell Cell System magazine.

This research shows us what is possible,” said researcher Wei Li. “We saw that defects in planteral mice can be eliminated and that bipateral reproduction barriers in mammals can be overcome through printing modifications. We also discovered some of the most important printed regions that hinder the development of mice with parents of the same gender, which are also interesting for the study of genomic printing and cloning of animals”.