by Kaykobad Hossain
The main contributing factor to infertility in women is decline in oocyte quantity and quality, which is usually age-related. For the women lacking functional gametes, in-vitro fertilization is not effective, which affects having genetically related children.
In this article, the researchers have investigated the use of mitomeiosis, an experimental reductive cell division process, to force premature division of non-replicated somatic genomes after they are transplanted into metaphase cytoplasm of enucleated human oocytes. However, somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) oocytes remained at the metaphase stage despite being fertilized with sperm, due to activation failure. Assisted activation was used for the release of human SCNT oocytes from the metaphase stage using a selective cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor. In their experiment, an average of 23 somatic chromosomes were maintained within the zygote, which demonstrates the feasibleness of experimentally reducing the diploid chromosome set to half.
Moreover, the researchers have successfully achieved normal embryonic cell divisions of fertilized human SCNT oocytes that ultimately developed into embryos with integrated sperm-derived and somatic chromosomes.
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Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy.
Marti Gutierrez N, Mikhalchenko A, Shishimorova M, Frana D, Van Dyken C, Li Y, Ma H, Koski A, Liang D, Lee SG, Eyberg D, Safaei Z, Kang E, Lee Y, O’Leary T, Lee D, Krieg S, Wu D, Rubin E, Amato P, Mitalipov S.
Nat Commun. 2025 Sep 30;16(1):8340. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-63454-7.