Success of Egg Cell Production from Body Cell

A Korea Research team opened the door to a new era of infertility treatment by producing the egg cells from body cells.

Maria Bioengineering Research Institute (Director, Park, Sepil) said on August 7 that the institute succeeded in producing a normal egg cell, whose nucleus was removed previously, by injecting the body cell, which was taken from an ear of cow.

The team removed half of the chromosomes from the body cell by electrical stimuli and chemical materials. Since the egg cell has half of the chromosomes from the body cell and the other half from the sperm, it may possess the whole pair of chromosomes once it is fertilized.

The team could produce 24 egg cells with half of the chromosomes from the 29 egg cells whose nuclei had been eliminated. Out of these, 6 egg cells were fertilized externally and then they developed into the status of embryo-disk that can be transplanted into a womb.

Thus, a new way has been opened for infertile women who can now give births to children through their own body cells. In the past, women born without an ovary suffered an early menopause. Or, by undergoing the ovariectomy, she could become pregnant by accepting an ovary from other women. In this case, half of the chromosomes were from the other woman. Director Park claimed, ``Last month US Cornell research team used the same method to produce human ovary successfully. The ovary was fertilized externally and then was once segmented. For cow, the nucleus of its ovary is very hard to locate so that the body cell transplantation from the cow is much more difficult than that of humans.``

Nevertheless, since this method, in which the body cell nucleus is transplanted into the ovary without the nucleus, is very similar to that of `dolly (cloned sheep)` cloning, the moral issue can be stirred. If a child is born by this method, it possesses the mitochondria DNA from the cytoplasm of the other woman`s ovary, as well as the chromosome DNAs from the parents. If this happens with different DNA, what kind of medical problems can be raised has not been studied.

Lee Young-Wan puset@donga.com