By Rachel Barclay -
Researchers in Japan have successfully bred mice using sperm and egg cells grown in the lab from the skin cells of another adult mouse.
Over the past decade, Mitinori Saitou at Kyoto University in Japan has been teasing apart the genetic cascade that prompts a stem cell to turn into a primordial germ cell (PGC), the cells that generate thousands of eggs in a woman and millions of sperm in a man. He has succeeded, with incredible implications for the future of human reproduction.
Saitou partnered with colleague Katsuhiko Hayashi from the University of Cambridge in the UK to take mature skin cells from an adult mouse and turn them into induced pluripotent stem cells.
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Mice grown from sperm and eggs cultivated from adult mouse skin cells
