ABOVE: A healthy adult bimaternal mouse with offspring of her own
LEYUN WANG
In research published in October in Cell Stem Cell, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences for the first time created mice from two male parents. (Mice with two female parents had been created before, and in the same paper, the team reported improving their technique for doing so.) Making animals from same-sex parents is challenging because the DNA from sperm and egg cells comes with very different epigenetic imprinting. The process for generating the bipaternal pups was a complex one, involving deleting some of the imprinted regions, and the mice died soon after birth. “Bimaternal reproduction, or parthenogenesis, is quite common among vertebrates in the nature, such as amphibians, reptiles, and fish,” writes coauthor Baoyang Hu in an email to The Scientist. “However, successful reproduction from two males is very rare.”
Nanoscale, self-assembling, DNA-origami sheets with a ...
