For the first time, scientists have used genetic engineering to trigger ‘virgin birth’ in female animals that normally need a male partner to reproduce1.
Previously, scientists have generated young mice2 and frogs3 with no genetic input from a male parent. But those offspring were made by tinkering with egg cells in laboratory dishes rather than by giving female animals the capacity for virgin birth, also known as parthenogenesis.
Earlier research identified candidate genes for parthenogenesis, says study co-author Alexis Sperling, a developmental biologist at the University of Cambridge, UK. But her team, she says, not only pinpointed such genes but also confirmed their function by activating them in another species.
In well evolved creatures, posterity are delivered when guys’ sperm treats females’ eggs. Be that as it may, numerous types of bug and reptile, as well as different creatures, have likewise developed parthenogenesis, which requires no hereditary commitment from a male, as a choice to sex.
To identify the genes that underlie parthenogenesis, Sperling and her colleagues sequenced the genomes of two strains of the fly Drosophila mercatorum: one that reproduces sexually and another that reproduces through parthenogenesis.
The researchers then compared gene activity in eggs from flies capable of parthenogenesis with that in eggs from flies capable of only sexual reproduction to identify the genes at work during one process but not the other.
The correlation permitted the creators to distinguish 44 qualities that were possibly associated with parthenogenesis. The scientists adjusted the same qualities in the natural product fly Drosophila melanogaster, which for the most part can’t duplicate abiogenetically.
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