Louise A Hyslop, Paul Blakeley, Lyndsey Craven, Jessica Richardson, Norah M E Fogarty, Elpida Fragouli, Mahdi Lamb, Sissy E Wamaitha, Nilendran Prathalingam, Qi Zhang, Hannah O'Keefe, Yuko Takeda, Lucia Arizzi, Samer Alfarawati, Helen A Tuppen, Laura Irving, Dimitrios Kalleas, Meenakshi Choudhary, Dagan Wells, Alison P Murdoch, Douglass M Turnbull, Kathy K Niakan, Mary Herbert
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations are maternally inherited and are associated with a broad range of debilitating and fatal diseases. Reproductive technologies designed to uncouple the inheritance of mtDNA from nuclear DNA may enable affected women to have a genetically related child with a greatly reduced risk of mtDNA disease. Here we report the first preclinical studies on pronuclear transplantation (PNT). Surprisingly, techniques used in proof-of-concept studies involving abnormally fertilized human zygotes were not well tolerated by normally fertilized zygotes...
June 16, 2016: Nature