U.S. Panel OKs Three-Parent Embryos with Sex Selection

This week a committee of scientists and ethicists have recommended to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that they approve three-parent embryo techniques for use in IVF in the United States. The committee calls it mitochondrial replacement techniques (MRT) because the goal is too "replace" defective mitochondria in woman with mitochondrial disease so they do not pass their genetic mutation onto their children.   We all have genetic material outside our nucleus in our mitochondria called mtDNA. We inherit our mtDNA solely from our mother. The mitochondria we inherit are in our mother's egg. There are two MRT procedures that the committee endorsed. One takes a donor egg and removes its nucleus, replacing it with the nucleus of the egg of a woman with defective mtDNA. This creates a hybrid egg with the genetic material from two women. That genetically modified egg is then fertilized with sperm.  The second technique is a step further, manipulating not eggs but embryos after fertilization. It requires two embryos. One embryo with defective mitochondria and one "donor" embryo with healthy mitochondria. The nucleus of the healthy embryo is removed, and it is replaced with the nucleus of embryo with defective mtDNA. Two embryos are taken apart and destroyed to make a hybrid third embryo. Both techniques are genetic engineering. Both techniques create embryos with genetic material from three people. Both are germ-line modifications, meaning they ...
Source: Mary Meets Dolly - Category: Genetics & Stem Cells Tags: Genetic Engineering Source Type: blogs