Scientists at Tokyo University of Agriculture in Tokyo, Japan, have produced a female mouse that is the offspring of two female parents. Considered biologically impossible up until now, the female mice were able to produce a daughter without the involvement of any male cells or sperm.
The baby mouse, nicknamed “Kaguya” by scientists (after a Japanese folk tale of the moon princess Kaguya), has shattered the scientific belief that two mammals of the same sex cannot produce offspring after her creation from the genetic material of two mammalian egg cells.
In 'parthenogenesis' (or 'virgin birth') the egg is the sole source of genetic material for the embryo. Although this is a mode of reproduction for some species, in mammals parthenogenesis can begin if an egg is 'activated', but the resulting embryonic growth (or 'parthenote') never survives for more than 72 hours.
Tomohiro Kono and his colleagues at the Tokyo University of Agriculture in Tokyo, Japan, got around this problem by manipulating the nucleus of a female egg to make it produce a protein called IGF-2, which is crucial to embryonic growth, and is normally found within DNA from the sperm of the male.
The nucleuii of these manipulated eggs were then transferred into ‘normal’ eggs that were combined with the genomes of two females, and proceeded to grow and divide. However, from the 457 reconstructed eggs, Kaguya and one sister were the only live offspring.
The potential (and obvious) use of this technology as way to allow a pair of human females to reproduce without the need for a man is not viable, at least for now. According to Azim Surani of Cambridge University, UK, males are still needed in human sexual reproduction.
"Clearly IGF-2 is the key gene," he says. "(They) managed to get around it, but to really get to a situation where the procedure would work as well as (fertilisation with) sperm, you would need to mutate a lot more genes."
In the near future, the work will be used to provide new genetic information to fields ranging from fundamental embryology to medically-assisted reproduction and the cloning of animals.
Quotes from: Link