Researchers have made a groundbreaking breakthrough in reproductive science by successfully creating a bi-paternal mouse, an animal with two male parents, using embryonic stem cell technology. The mouse survived to adulthood, marking a significant advancement in the field.
A team of scientists led by Wei Li of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has engineered the bi-paternal mouse by precisely modifying key genes involved in reproduction, overcoming longstanding barriers to unisexual reproduction in mammals. Their findings, published on January 28, 2025, detail how they overcame the challenges faced by previous attempts at creating such a mouse.
The researchers focused on targeting imprinting genes, which regulate gene expression in various ways. They modified 20 key imprinting genes individually using different techniques and found that these edits allowed the creation of bi-paternal animals with stable pluripotency. The study also revealed that not all pups born to these mice lived to adulthood due to developmental defects.
While the researchers acknowledge several limitations in their work, they believe that further modifications to the imprinting genes could lead to healthy bi-paternal mice capable of producing viable gametes and paving new therapeutic strategies for imprinting-related diseases.
The team plans to continue studying how modifying imprinting genes affects embryo development potential and extend their experimental approaches to larger animals, including monkeys. However, the application of this technology to solving human disease remains unclear due to ethical guidelines prohibiting heritable genome editing for reproductive purposes in humans.
Source: https://scitechdaily.com/defying-biology-chinese-scientists-engineer-mouse-with-two-male-parents