Sex-changing mouse clones may help fight to save endangered species
Scientific American · Gennaro Tomma ·
For the first time, scientists managed to turn cloned male mouse embryos into females, giving life to healthy and fertile individuals
Scientists racing to save critically endangered species may soon have a new tool at their disposal: sex-changing clones. For the first time, researchers managed to turn cloned male mouse embryos into females, giving life to healthy and fertile animals. The technique could one day help scientists rescue endangered species with only a few surviving individuals.
“I think it’s a really neat foundational breakthrough in reproductive science,” says Ben Novak, lead scientist at Revive and Restore, a nonprofit that promotes biotechnology for wildlife conservation. “Being able to manipulate chromosome counts and chromosome makeup will open up a new avenue of functional genomic science.” Novak wasn’t involved in the new study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Inspired by the Okinawa rubble goby, a Japanese fish that can switch sex, researchers used a method based on the gene-editing tool CRISPR to eliminate the Y chromosome from male embryos, which typically carry both X and Y chromosomes. This process turned the embryos female with just a single X chromosome—typically notated as XO.
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