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A male animal can only produce a male clone, and vice versa – at least, that was the case until now. In a breakthrough they describe as “strange and fascinating,” scientists in Japan have broken that rule by engineering fertile female clones from male mice.
They then introduced these opposite-sex clones to their original donor and bred a new generation of fertile mice.
The study is yet to be peer-reviewed, but IFLScience spoke to the Japanese scientists behind the research, who explained how their techniques could make a real impact in the world of animal conservation.
In a technique called “dual-sex cloning," scientists at RIKEN BioResource Research Center and the University of Yamanashi in Japan took male mice (with XY chromosomes) and removed their Y chromosomes early in their development using a CRISPR gene-editing technique called Y-CUT.
The engineered embryos were transferred to surrogate mice, which gave birth to female pups with the sex chromosomes XO (meaning they have one X chromosome and no Y chromosome). The female mice were genetically identical to the original male, except for this single sex chromosome.
“We knew theoretically that removing the Y chromosome could produce an XO female from our IVF embryo experiments, but actually seeing female pups born from a male donor was quite remarkable,” the scientists commented.
Clones of opposite sex can give birth to healthy babies.
They then introduced these opposite-sex clones to their original donor and bred a new generation of fertile mice.
The study is yet to be peer-reviewed, but IFLScience spoke to the Japanese scientists behind the research, who explained how their techniques could make a real impact in the world of animal conservation.
In a technique called “dual-sex cloning," scientists at RIKEN BioResource Research Center and the University of Yamanashi in Japan took male mice (with XY chromosomes) and removed their Y chromosomes early in their development using a CRISPR gene-editing technique called Y-CUT.
The engineered embryos were transferred to surrogate mice, which gave birth to female pups with the sex chromosomes XO (meaning they have one X chromosome and no Y chromosome). The female mice were genetically identical to the original male, except for this single sex chromosome.
“We knew theoretically that removing the Y chromosome could produce an XO female from our IVF embryo experiments, but actually seeing female pups born from a male donor was quite remarkable,” the scientists commented.
Clones of opposite sex can give birth to healthy babies.
