Since 1996 WHN is the second oldest medical website on the net, second only to the American Medical Association, servicing over 35,000 physicians and scientists worldwide.
Non-Profit Trusted Source of Non-Commercial Health Information
A fundamental discovery about a driver of healthy development in embryos could rewrite our understanding of what can be inherited from our parents and how their life experiences may shape us. The new research suggests that epigenetic information, which sits on top of DNA and is normally reset between generations, is more frequently carried from …
Scientists at the Francis Crick Institute, in collaboration with the University of Kent, have used gene-editing technology to create female-only and male-only mice litters with 100% efficiency. This proof of principle study, published in Nature Communications on Friday 3rd December, demonstrates how the technology could be used to improve animal welfare in scientific research and …
For species that rely on sexual reproduction, including mice and men, offspring can only happen if sperm from the male fertilize eggs from the female. Even artificial fertilization techniques depend on donors for both of these cells. However, a new study led by ASHBi researchers shows that mouse pluripotent stem cells can differentiate into functional …
Investigators in China and the United States have injected human stem cells into primate embryos and were able to grow chimeric embryos for a significant period of time — up to 20 days. The research, despite its ethical concerns, has the potential to provide new insights into developmental biology and evolution. It also has implications …
Artificial embryos that were created without using sperm or eggs were observed to have started to form live fetuses after being implanted into female mice for the first time; embryos did have some malformations and this approach is still a very long way from being applicable to human babies. The artificial mouse embryos were created …
Smoking during pregnancy is a documented risk factor for premature birth, low birth weight, and miscarriage. Colleagues from Stanford University and the University of Arizona have developed a human embryonic stem cell model to demonstrate how nicotine adversely affects different cell types in developing embryos, as published in Stem Cell Reports. Nicotine containing products …
A step forward has been taken in creating artificial embryos using mouse stem cells to manufacture structures capable of taking a critical step in development of life, as published in the journal Nature Cell Biology. Scientists from Cambridge University have built embryo-like structures from scratch which has bypassed the act of fertilization by growing them in …
Independent inquiry has concluded that DNA editing of human embryo, sperm, or egg to influence characteristics of a future person could be permissible, but if that is to happen a number of measures are needed to be in place to ensure genome editing would be done in a manner ethically responsible and acceptable. Genome editing …