Gay mice

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She holds a graduate certificate in science communication from UC Santa Cruz and degrees in neuroscience and dance from the University of Florida. With 19 tweaks, they had issues with placental growth in pregnancy but fared better after birth. This prevented their offspring developing defects which led to earlier death (stock image)

When these genetically modified stem cells were combined with the sperm from another male, they were much more likely to develop properly.

These changes resulted in mice with two fathers who were able to live until adulthood for the first time ever.

Study co-author Dr Guan-Zheng Luo, of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, says: 'These findings provide strong evidence that imprinting abnormalities are the main barrier to mammalian unisexual reproduction.

'This approach can significantly improve the developmental outcomes of embryonic stem cells and cloned animals, paving a promising path for the advancement of regenerative medicine.'

The authors do acknowledge some significant limitations to these findings.

Only 11.8 per cent of the viable embryos were capable of developing to birth and not every pup which was born lived to adulthood.

The mice that did live to adulthood showed altered growth, shortened lifespans, and were sterile.

However, these results show the first promising steps towards giving gay men the option to have children who are related to both of their fathers.

In the future, the development of this technique could allow gay men to have children who are genetically related to both partners.

Her work has appeared in The Scientist, Science News, the Mercury News, Mongabay and Stanford Medicine Magazine, among other outlets. Using a clever technique, the team ensured that each of these egg cells carried two X chromosomes — the sex-chromosome pairing typically found in females. In the new study, published Tuesday (Jan. Until now, many similar attempts have resulted in unhealthy offspring.

“The unique characteristics of imprinting genes have led scientists to believe that they are a fundamental barrier to unisexual reproduction in mammals,” said study coauthor Qi Zhou of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in a statement about the work.

“Even when constructing bi-maternal or bi-paternal embryos artificially, they fail to develop properly, and they stall at some point during development due to these genes.”

The Chinese scientists aren’t the first to bring up bi-paternal mice that lived to adulthood; a team from Japan made that breakthrough in 2023.

It's likely that additional imprinting genes could be tweaked to help snuff out the remaining health issues, he said. Based in NYC, she also remains heavily involved in dance and performs in local choreographers' work.

First mouse with two biological FATHERS reaches adulthood - in breakthrough that could pave the way for gay men to have children

The first mouse with two biological fathers has survived until adulthood, a new study has revealed.

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences say they have succeeded in breeding mice using only genetic material from two males.

Through a technique called 'embryonic stem cell engineering’, scientists created eggs from the sperm of one father which could be fertilised by the other.

The stem cell technique used by the researchers is not entirely new, but all previous attempts faced seemingly insurmountable problems.

Mice bred using two sets of male genes either failed to grow at all or were born with severe developmental defects that prevented them from reaching adulthood.

However, by editing 20 different genes in the mice's stem cells, the researchers were able to prevent these issues.

Co-author of the study Dr Wei Li says: 'This work will help to address a number of limitations in stem cell and regenerative medicine research.'

While it is currently only possible in mice, this major breakthrough could pave the way for gay men to have children who are biologically related to both fathers.

"This is another significant step forward in understanding the biology of imprinting," he told Live Science.

Tweaking "imprinted" genes

In the 2023 study, the scientists in Japan collected skin cells from adult male mice and transformed the skin into stem cells that could be used to grow eggs. 28) in the journal Cell Stem Cell, scientists not only bred two-dad mice that could live to adulthood, but did so in a way that might shed new light on a complex suite of genes whose activity varies depending on which parent you inherit them from.

But sometimes, when only one of the pair is expressed while the other is silenced, you have imprinting. To do this we will link your MailOnline account with your Facebook account. For context, we normally inherit a copy of a gene from each parent. When you attempt to make embryos with DNA from two dads, you would otherwise face a slew of these imprinting issues because too many paternal genes stay active and no maternal genes are around to compensate.

"Our approach directly targets imprinted genes, which have long been suspected to play a central role in bi-paternal reproductive barriers," complicating the challenge of generating offspring with two male parents, study co-lead author Zhi-kun Li, an associate professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, told Live Science in an email.

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In a previous study, Li and colleagues tweaked just seven imprinting hotspots, or "loci" in the genome, and produced mouse fetuses that made it through pregnancy, but those mice died after birth, Li said.

Simply put, it causes too many genes to go haywire.

To address this, the researchers first grew stem cells from sperm DNA. They then edited the stem cells to prevent twenty mice genes known to be heavily involved in their developmental stage from being imprinted.

While it’s just a portion of the total number that undergo this process in mice, according to MIT Technology Review, it made an impact.

This finally gives rise to a fertilized egg that can develop into a mouse pup with DNA from two dads.

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As a crucial step, the scientists introduced 20 genetic tweaks into the DNA of the stem cells. The team also wants to try their approach in additional animal species to see how well it translates.

In the long run, this line of research could help scientists better understand imprinting disorders, potentially paving the way to treatments that use gene editing to fix them in humans, Li suggested.

Latham added that, by better understanding the genetic pathways involved, scientists might be able to identify ways to counter the disorders with drugs, rather than gene editing.

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You can choose on each post whether you would like it to be posted to Facebook. The resulting imbalance can often cause developmental defects, which plagued previous attempts at creating a bi-paternal mouse. In their previous work, they were able to breed mice with two moms that survived to adulthood with much less genetic tweaking, as have other research groups.