Today I am going to try something different. I am going to write an extremely brief post about a cool topic, no long detailed background section (that will be reserved for my weekend posts), no extensive data discussion, no detailed breakdown. This is a brief report!
Todays article of choice is titled "Tracing and Characterizing the Development of Transplanted Female Germline Stem Cells In Vivo," and was published online in the journal Molecular Therapy.
The authors were doing some experimentation to try to tackle sterility. There are a lot of reasons why someone can become sterile: you could be born that way, or perhaps had cancer and received chemo therapy or radiation therapy. What if we could use stem cells to allow people who are sterile, to re-gain their reproductive abilities? Wouldn't that be amazing? Well this is precisely what the authors of this article accomplished... in mice.
Briefly... What Did They Do?
Recently (in mice... of course) researchers had illustrated how to isolate and culture female germline (this means reproductive) stem cells, and that these cells are capable of producing babies. [2]. What had not been studied, was whether these stem cells could be implanted into the ovaries of sterile mice, and whether or not doing so would allow the mice to get pregnant.
The authors isolated the female germline stem cells from a newborn mouses ovary, and cultured them based on a recently published protocol. [3] They found that the stem cells grew well and had normal numbers of chromosomes, aka nothing weird was going on.
The authors then generated a green fluorescent version of these germline stem cells, and implanted them into an ovary (they wanted to visualize where they went!) They found that they migrated to the edges of the ovary with in a couple days after transplantation. After 6 days they observed that some of the cells were getting larger, which suggested to the authors that they were beginning to differentiate into egg cells.
They next wanted to see if this could happen in a sterile ovary, and perhaps restore fertility to a poor sterile little mouse (remember the goal from all of this is to potentially treat sterile humans). So they implanted the germline stem cells, then waited two months. At that point they investigated what was going on in those infertile mice and they saw that there were egg cells in various stages of development. Next they wanted to see if the mice could actually get pregnant.
To do this they put mice in two little cups and had them kiss (like the gif above)... kidding. They let those mice go to bone-town, and found that 75% of the stem cell recipient mice were able to get pregnant. Not bad!
Very Brief Conclusions
Ovarian derived stem cells (from young mice) were transplanted into infertile mice, and that transplantation restored the ability of those mice to get pregnant and have babies.
The authors work here appears to have laid down the fundamental ground floor for the development of a future means to treat infertility.
Sources
- http://www.cell.com/molecular-therapy-family/molecular-therapy/fulltext/S1525-0016(17)30180-6
- https://www.nature.com/ncb/journal/v11/n5/full/ncb1869.html
- http://www.nature.com/protocolexchange/protocols/2552
All Non Cited Images Are From Pixabay.com And Are Available Under Creative Commons Licenses
Any Gifs Are From Giphy.com and Are Also Available for Use Under Creative Commons Licences
I don't expect this brief article to make a splash, however I will be distributing all SBD rewards in the form of Steem Power out equally to anyone who comments in this article (commenting more than once will not gain you more, it will be calculated per user, the fewer user comments the bigger your potential prize... the more comments, smaller your prize, everyone who comments will get something).
I am doing this as an experiment to see who actually reads down here ;)
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