Source: BBC

By James Gallagher

Health and science reporter, BBC News website

Scientists say early experiments suggest it may one day be possible to make babies without using eggs.

They have succeeded in creating healthy baby mice by tricking sperm into believing they were fertilising normal eggs.

The findings in Nature Communications, could, in the distant future, mean women can be removed from the baby-making process, say the researchers.

For now, the work helps to explain some of the details of fertilisation.

End of mum and dad?

The University of Bath scientists started with an unfertilised egg in their experiments.

They used chemicals to trick it into becoming a pseudo-embryo.

These “fake” embryos share much in common with ordinary cells, such as skin cells, in the way they divide and control their DNA.

The researchers reasoned that if injecting sperm into mouse pseudo-embryos could produce healthy babies, then it might one day be possible to achieve a similar result in humans using cells that are not from eggs.

Image copyrightTONY PERRY

In the mouse experiments, the odds of achieving a successful pregnancy was one in four.

Dr Tony Perry, one of the researchers, told the BBC News website: “This is the first time that anyone has been able to show that anything other than an egg can combine with a sperm in this way to give rise to offspring.

“It overturns nearly 200 years of thinking.”

Those baby mice were healthy, had a normal life expectancy and had healthy pups of their own.

Fertilisation

The goal of the researchers is to understand the exact mechanisms of fertilisation because what happens when a sperm fuses with an egg is still a bit of a mystery.

For example, the egg completely strips the sperm’s DNA of all its chemical clothing and re-dresses it.

That stops the sperm behaving like a sperm and makes it act like an embryo, but how the “costume change” takes place is not clear.

Removing the need for an egg could have a wider impact on society.

Dr Perry said: “One possibility, in the distant future, is that it might be possible that ordinary cells in the body can be combined with a sperm so that an embryo is formed.”

Read more