A healthy and fertile daughter of a Y-less male, shown with her own litter MONIKA WARDSry, long known to be critical for the development of testes, and Eif2s3y, more recently recognized as the kick-starter of spermatogenesis, are all the only genes from the Y chromosome required for male mice to generate early-stage sperm precursors capable of fertilizing eggs and yielding live offspring, according to new research published today (November 21) in Science.
“It’s quite an amazing technique to be able to get live, healthy offspring from round spermatids, which are way early in the final process of sperm maturation,” said Polly Campbell, an evolutionary biologist who studies the genetics of speciation at Oklahoma State University but was not involved in the research. Moreover, she added, the spermatids often showed abnormal morphology, yet were still able to yield offspring through an assisted reproductive technique. “That is probably the single most striking thing about this paper,” she said.
Reproductive biologist Monika Ward from the University of Hawaii in Honolulu has long been interested in the function of genes that exist on the male-only Y chromosome. Previously, Ward’s group had shown that it was possible to generate live offspring from ...
