Artificial Embryos

       Artificial embryos

Hey everyone,

                      I'm back with an interesting and rather chilling topic. What if I told you that growing people in labs like those sci-fi movies is actually a possibility. It is actually done now the path is paved and the availability is there. Now, we won't need a egg from the female or the sperm of a male to form a baby just our basic stem cell(the cells in our body) is enough.

Stem cells

Scientists from the university of Cambridge,UK has developed realistic mouse-looking embryos just using the stem cells plucked from another embryos no sperm,no egg just using stem cells. Pretty cool right?

Now before going into the subject. What is an embryo? In simpler terms, embryo is the initial stage of a baby in the mother's womb just right after a egg is fertilised by the sperm.

What is artificial embryos and how it is formed?

mice embryo

UK scientists have successfully grown a mouse embryo in a lab which indicates soon this can be applied to humans. Growing embryos apart from the nature's way of fertilisation is called as artificial embryos.

Now to grow a mouse embryo two kinds of stem cells are taken from a mouse.

Embryonic stem cells(cells from embryo) and extraembryonic Trophoblast stem cells(TSC)(these cells are responsible for providing nutrients to the embryo). These cells form the placenta(The placenta forms a wall around the fetus providing nutrients and oxygen and also taking away the waste from the fetus).These two types of cells are mixed and placed on a 3D scaffolds  then grown in a tank of chemicals providing a similar environment to that of the womb. The cells grew resembling the structure of an natural mouse embryo in 96 hours.

These synthetic embryos have been further researched in the university of bath and then injected into female mice and had a success rate of 25% and 30 mouse pups were born this marks a major breakthrough that mammals can actually be born without a egg after all.

The potential applications are it can eliminate infertility as human pregnancies are becoming more inefficient and also reduce chronic disease.

Some other breakthrough

Growing human organs in pigs

  Scientists from University of California have been attempting to grow human organs such as a pancreas,lungs etc in pigs. Yup this is happening. 

Gene editing

Now to grow a pair of lungs from pigs embryo first we must remove the part of the pig's DNA responsible for growing lungs in the fertilized pig's embryo using CRISPR gene editing(I've made a separate post about this) and a void is created after the gene editing and the human induced lung stem cells is injected into the embryo to fill that void. The human-pig embryo known as chimera is now implanted into a sow(female pig) and allowed to grow for 28 days then the pregnancy is terminated and then tissue is removed for analysis.The chimera would have developed into a normal pig and then the lungs are ready to be harvested and implanted into humans.

Human induced pluripotent stem cells are adult stem cells capable of growing into any organ we need like lungs,corneas, pancreas, hearts,livers and kidneys. With pigs serving as biological incubators humans can grow what ever organs they need in pigs.

The constraint is that injecting human stem cells may cause pig brains to be similar to humans and they may behave in the same way as humans(creepy right?). There is also a ethical question about animal abuse as eating pork is not enough and now we are harvesting pigs for organs.

In general the science and technological advancement is booming like crazy and in a very short time humans will be born without the need of mother's womb. To make it even more crazy mutation as in X-Men is possible with gene editing.

FACT FLASH:

mutant

Scientists from University of Sun Yat-Sen university in china have been trying to induce mutation in human stem cells using CRISPR cas 9 and out of 86 embryos inserted with the enzyme only 28 survived and only a fraction of 28 contained the replacement genetic material. Still pretty crazy that they actually succeeded.

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