alt Hacker NewsThat can't be good. Life cycle of a human egg is organized around preserving mitochondria to be as young and fresh as possible across generations. Using adult cell, even a stem cell to make an egg probably gives it mitochondrial damage that usually takes hundreds of human generations to accumulate.
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Mitochondria can be translplanted/replaced. There already therapies and babies born out of these kinds of procedures
Life wouldn’t be here if mitochondria only accumulated damage. We can do in the lab what biology does in the wild - introduce selection pressures. Either by sequencing iPSC clones and picking the best, somehow inducing the natural purifying selection, or simply using a donor mitochondria.
I wonder if you could coax cells from the testes back into stem cells to then re-specialize into ovarian cells.
genuinely curious: how does any life still exist if this holds true?
Really interesting point if true. Makes sense to me, and I’m sure the team is trying to solve it
Instead of just dismissing this and saying this can't possibly work, it would be better to ask: how do they get around problems of mitochondrial damage, or have they not tackled that yet?
Because it is unlikely that you just punched a hole through the plan of the several dozen people in bioengineering, life sciences, and other related fields that are at this company.
If this ever becomes a pressing issue, you can do cell selection and mitochondrial transplants.
As long as mitochondrial damage is not uniform, you can sample for cells with low mtDNA damage and no known-harmful mutations, and base your eggs on those cell lines. Do "in vitro" what natural selection would have done "in vivo", reduce damage accumulation that way - potentially to zero.
And if you really want to, you can make eggs off a "known good mtDNA" cell line, then swap a new nucleus into them (cloning-like process), and get a cell line with target nuclear DNA and known good mtDNA. Mitochondrial replacement therapy. Then make eggs off that hybrid line.
Involved lab work, but, perfectly doable, and rides the same stack you already use for IVF. Mitochondrial replacement is already a known tech, but only worthwhile for cases of known harmful mtDNA anomalies currently. "Good mtDNA" eggs are sourced from donors instead of produced from cell lines currently, but this tech might change that too.