Human Stem Cells With Half A Genome

Shanni-kie Watson

February 10th, 2017

The Human Body

Current Event: Human stem cell with half a genome could help infertile couples

Link: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2081250-human-stem-cell-with-half-a-genome-could-help-infertile-couples/

Summary:

Scientists have created a new kind of human stem cell that has just half a genome. To create the novel stem cells, Benvenisty’s colleague, Dieter Egli from Columbia University Medical Center and the New York Stem Cell Foundation, used electricity and chemicals to force an unfertilised human egg cell to divide.

Having a set of human cells with only one set of chromosomes will help our understanding of how gene mutations affect the behaviour of cells, says Jose Silva, a researcher at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute in the UK.Embryonic stem cells are diploid cells from which all tissues in the body are built. They are called diploid cells.

Now that we can make haploid versions of any cell in the human body with one set of chromosomes, researchers can easily mutate single genes and immediately see what happens to the behaviour of the cell.

“Since we’ve shown they can, it poses the interesting question of why we reproduce sexually rather than from a single parent.” The new embryonic stem cells could potentially be used to create eggs and sperm for infertile couples.

Now, Nissim Benvenisty, director of the Azrieli Center for Stem Cells and Genetic Research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and his colleagues have generated haploid embryonic stem cells with a single set of chromosomes.

“Most researchers believed human haploid cells could not divide and differentiate into different cell types,” says Benvenisty. The cells can be turned into any tissue in the human body, despite only containing one set of chromosomes. Egg and sperm cells are the exception – they are haploid cells with one set of chromosomes. They then showed that it was possible for these haploid cells to divide and turn into other tissues such as heart, brain and gut cells.

Reaction/Opinion: My reaction the article was that the article is really interesting and it reminded me of what I had learnt in my biochem class in 1th grade. It is always a good thing to hear or learn about what goes on inside the human body. Is it always good to see scientists constantly finding new researches in the world of science.  

Questions:

1. How did they come to discover this?

2. Is it a 100% that this can create sterms and eggs for infertile couples?

MLA Citation

"Human stem cell with half a genome could help infertile couples." New Scientist. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Feb. 2017.