Japanese scientists claim they are about to grow human babies in the lab, by incubating eggs and sperm in an artificial womb.
Thanks to this new breakthrough, Japanese scientists will be able to produce human eggs and sperm in the laboratory from "scratch", which can then develop in an artificial womb.
Professor Katsuhiko Hayashi, a stem cell biologist at Kyushu University who discovered the process in mice, believes he still has just five years to replicate the results in humans.
Hayashi's team used this "artificial surrogacy" method to create baby mice from two biological male parents, using skin cells from a mouse to create a viable egg and then fertilize it.
According to the new study, published in the journal Nature, the team converted male mouse skin cells into pluripotent stem cells, which have the ability to develop into different types of cells or tissues, such as cell shapers.
The team then grew these cells and treated them with a drug that transformed male stem cells into female cells, thus producing functional egg cells.
Meanwhile, fertilizing those eggs and implanting this model baby into female mice simultaneously led to the artificial conception of male mice.
Although only 1% of the embryos (seven out of 630) grew into live mice, the scientists believe the experiment could have important implications for human reproduction.
"It's a very clever strategy," said Diana Laird, a stem and reproductive cell expert at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. "It's an important step in both stem cells and reproductive biology."
In fact, this process could theoretically be replicated in humans by injecting embryos produced by pluripotent stem cells into a female's uterus.
However, while scientists have been able to engineer human eggs and sperm in the laboratory — a process known as in vitro gametogenesis — they haven't been able to create original embryos. In other words, the method of artificially making babies is still in its embryonic stage.
Dr. Hayashi estimated that it would take about half a decade to replicate the production of egg-like cells in humans, and 10 to 20 years of testing to confirm that this method of artificial reproduction is safe for use in clinics.
One concern about this scientific breakthrough is the mutations and errors that may be introduced into a petri dish before stem cells are used to make eggs.
If successful, the technology could provide a huge boon for those suffering from infertility, a condition that affects 1 in 6 worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.
The idea of laboratory-grown children is not without legal and ethical concerns, including the concern about designing children to have certain traits using gene editing tools, which gives way to the concept of the supposed ideal child.
There are also fears that some may be forced to bear children against their will using a lock of hair or a piece of skin.
NASA : The discovery of a planetary system 156 light-years from Earth may solve the mystery of formation
Using observations from NASA's TESS telescope, a system of two planets slightly larger than Earth has been discovered orbiting a cool star in a synchronized dance.
Scientists led by the University of Liège in Belgium named the system TOI-2096, and it is located 156 light-years from Earth in the constellation of the Dragon.
Astronomers discover an unusually low-density "Great Earth".
This discovery is the result of close cooperation between European and American universities, and was made possible thanks to the US space mission TESS, which aims to find planets orbiting nearby bright stars.
Francisco J. Pozuelos, astrophysicist, first author of the paper, and former member of the ExoTIC laboratory at the University of Liège, who has now joined the Spanish National Research Council (IAA-CSIC), explains: “TESS scans the entire sky using the transit method, that is, observing "The stellar brightness of thousands of stars searches for a slight dimming, which could be caused by a planet passing between the star and the observer. Despite its ability to detect new worlds, the TESS mission needs support from ground-based telescopes to confirm the planetary nature of the detected signals."
The star, known as TIC 142748283, hosts two exoplanets (outside the solar system), which revolve around it in slightly eccentric orbits, in what is known as "orbital resonance".
The inner planet, which is called a super-Earth, is about 1.2 times larger than Earth. The outer planet is Neptune minor, which is about 1.9 times larger than our planet.
The planets TOI-2096 b and TOI-2096 c have been observed with an international network of ground-based telescopes, allowing them to be confirmed and characterized. Most of the transits were obtained by scientists using telescopes from the TRAPPIST and SPECULOOS projects led by the University of Liège.
"After a thorough analysis of the data, we found that the two planets were in resonant orbits: for each orbit of the outer planet, the inner planet orbits the star twice," says Mathilde Timmermans, PhD student in the ExoTIC laboratory at the University of Liège.
And she continued: “The orbital periods of the two planets are very close to being a multiple of each other by about 3.12 days for the planet TOI-2096 b and about 6.38 days for the planet TOI-2096 c. This is a very special configuration, and it causes a strong gravitational interaction between the planets. This interaction leads to a delay Or speed up the passage of planets in front of their star and could lead to the measurement of planetary masses with larger telescopes in the near future."
The scientists who led the discovery estimate that the radius of the planet TOI-2096 b - closest to its star - is 1.2 times that of Earth, hence the name "super-Earth". Its characteristics could be similar to those of Earth: a planet with a mostly rocky composition, possibly surrounded by a thin atmosphere.
Similarly, TOI-2096 c has a radius of 1.9 times the radius of Earth and 55% of the radius of Neptune, which places the planet in the category of "minor Neptunes," planets consisting of rocky and icy cores surrounded by elongated hydrogen, or water-rich atmospheres. Like Uranus and Neptune in our solar system.
These sizes are very interesting because the number of planets with radii between 1.5 and 2.5 Earth radii is smaller than theoretical models predict, making such planets rare.
Mathilde Timmermans points out that "these planets are of crucial importance due to their sizes, and the formation of the super-Earth planets and mini-Neptunes remains a mystery even today. There are many formation models that try to explain this, but nothing that fits the observations perfectly."
She continued, "TOI-2096 is the only system that exists so far that contains a super-Earth and a small Neptune with a precision in sizes where the models conflict with each other. In other words, TOI-2096 may be the system we have been looking for to understand how these planetary systems formed."