ABOVE: A healthy adult bimaternal mouse with offspring of her own
LEYUN WANG
Over the last decade or so, researchers have generated mouse pups with genetic contributions from two female parents by manipulating imprinted genomic regions, where epigenetic modifications of the DNA restrict the expression of certain genes to one parent’s copy. In a study published today (October 11) in Cell Stem Cell, a team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences has improved on prior work by producing mice with two mothers that appear to grow normally—unlike the mice produced in previous efforts—and live to have pups of their own. They used a similar strategy to make embryos with two fathers, but the progeny did not survive long after birth.
“This is basically the first study that shows that you can generate a mouse from two fathers. It is impressive,” says Hendrik Marks, a biologist at Radboud University in the Netherlands ...
