No need for fathers?

ElectricFetus

ElectricFetus

Sanity going, going, gone
Valued Senior Member
Printed in the 4-22-04 volume of nature is an article about the resent success of making two mice from female gametes only, no sperm just combination of two eggs. The article describes that one of the mother mice was genetically modified to display a male imprinted epigenetic factor instead of a female imprinted factor.

Imprinted genes are genes methylated so that they are turned on or off depending on the sex of the gamete’s source, in male gametes certain genes are imprinted and in female gametes other genes are imprinted. When normally two sperm or two ova are combined the embryo fails to develop properly and dies, because the wrong genes were imprinted, only when sperm and ova combine are the right order of genes imprinted.

Back to the mice, one of the mothers was genetically modified to have a imprinting gene imprinted as male, as a result after over 400 tries they produced two health mice pups that had no father.

For the technology to have practical value in human reproduction, cells would have to be extracted from the parents, induced into gametes, be appropriately imprinted and combined to form a embryo; most of what I just described is still theoretical technologies. So for now men not obsolete.
 
where have you been? i heard about this several years ago. the procedure (similar to that one) was cited as being an option for lesbian couples so they can have a child together with genes from both of them. i guess you men need to do more to justify your existence now.
 
I'm sorry but this is a very new break though. The previous procedure did not involved changing impinting genes.
 
Question for some one intelligent.

Apparently ‘male’ germ cells can be turned into egg or sperm. So if you took a male germ cell and turned it into an egg does it have the imprinting pattern of a female? As far as I can tell this wouldn’t be that useful because the fertilised egg would end up with two ‘female’ imprinted sets, but if you could take a female germ cell, turn it into a sperm cell, and then fertilised an egg you’d get a ‘compatible’ imprinted set. Which I guess is the experiment that SwedishFish is referring to, but was the imprinting pattern actually checked of the egg and sperm? :confused:


(got lost using germ and stem....why can't this be simple :p
 
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I would not know, I have seen little reports on making gametes from stem cells, I know in theory its possible but how its actually done is beyond me. I would like the see what reference SwedishFish has first.
 
dude, you don't know what you're talking about. the new york times science section did a whole spread on it (yes, from actual published papers :rolleyes: ) a few years ago when i was taking developmental. the prof brought it in to show the class because that's what we were covering in the course at the time. find your own reference: nytimes.com
 
let me get this strait" the New York Times bet Nature (one of the worlds most respectable science journals) to this report by several years??? No SwedishFish you provided the claim you must support it with evidence or else we can call it bullshit and there would be nothing else you could do about it.
 
::resisting the urge to call you names::

the ny times doesn't publish research. it reported on studies (see post above: "yes, from actual published papers") done on this subject. if you want a reference you can find it yourself; i provided the link (see post above).
 
I can't find it therefore I call what your saying bullshit, until you can prove otherwise. My article is well referenced and claims to be the first of its kind:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3643847.stm
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040422/news_1n22nomales.html
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/4/21/172639.shtml
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/Living/SciTech/virgin_birth_female_dna_040421-1.html
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,63160,00.html?tw=wn_techhead_8
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=mice+no+father

This has been the first time this form of reproduction has been successful in mammals, period. I remember studies in the past to try to do this but none actually doing it, perhaps that is what you’re talking about?
 
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viable offspring that have only maternal
genes — none from the father — can be
produced through parthenogenetic reproduction
in plants and most groups of animals
 
paulsamuel,

Did I not say this was a first for mammals? Although it also make sense the SwedishFish is confusing a study of such on a non-mammalian model.
 
What you can't read??? Its just 5 post above this one, can't miss it, here let me quote my self:
WellCookedFetus said:
This has been the first time this form of reproduction has been successful in mammals, period.
Click to expand...
 
WellCookedFetus said:
What you can't read??? Its just 5 post above this one, can't miss it, here let me quote my self:
Click to expand...

sorry, did not see it. i was looking in the first post.
 
Apology accepted :) I was starting to get the idea that you were just try to be a jerk to me, I should apologies for thinking such things.

Now back to the issue: care to wager how long until we see this kind of thing in assisted reproduction?
 
I hope I'm not missing something already stated but does this work in reverse? Can sperm + sperm = baby? Just curious.

It would be great if this could be applicable to humans, both possibilities are interesting but I can't see this method of reproduction taking over. Since the majority of humanity is straight, I assume penis + vagina = baby will remain the favored method of reproduction, it's just too much damn fun.

Sex is one of the few things in life that's really easy to do.
 
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I looked at the NYT, unfortunately to see the whole article you have to pay, so I can’t be sure but I think there might have been a confusion about what experiments were being done. A couple of years ago they did turn male stem cells into what I assume would be a type of ‘fertilised’ egg, and they grew, but they did not try to bring it to term, and so the reports make it sound like the experiment produces ‘healthy’ pre-embryos. But imprinting kicks in at a later stage which is why this experiment listed here is interesting.

Mice have a lower number of imprinted genes –humans have around 70 maternal and paternal imprinted genes, some of which have different patterns of imprinting in different tissue. As far as I know this experiment only imprinted one gene....a long way to go yet.
 
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