Mouse embryonic germ cells and male gametes created ...( rly embryos into female mice to see if ...)

Infertility, birth defects
The ability to make both embryonic germ cells and male gametes in the lab is unprecedented and has powerful implications for understanding how germ cells mature, and may suggest new approaches to infertility, says Geijsen. "A lot of problems with infertility start very early," he says. "Something goes wrong in the germ cell at a very early stage."

Geijsen wonders, for example, why they were able to create far more embryonic germ cells than gametes in the lab - what made the germ cells stop developing? The ability to get more of the germ cells to mature into functional gametes may someday help infertile men who cannot make full-fledged sperm that would allow them to father children, but do have primitive sperm stem cells.

Being able to study the very earliest stages of development may also shed light on birth defects, Daley adds. "Germ cells are given the responsibility for perpetuating the species, and understanding how germ-cell formation goes awry may teach us about early developmental defects, as well as some forms of male infertility," he says. "Our research is aimed at understanding normal and pathologic tissue formation, and not so much at futuristic means of assisted reproduction."

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Contact: Mary Ellen Shay
mary.Shay@tch.harvard.edu
617-355-6420
Children's Hospital Boston
10-Dec-2003