Chinese scientists have created one organism from the stem cells of a cynomolgus monkey. implemented into the embryo of the same monkey species. They also used green fluorescent protein to see by glow which tissues had grown from foreign stem cells. The baby chimera monkey only lived a few days, but researchers hope the breakthrough will help medical research into diseases such as motor neurone disease. The study was published in the journal Cell.
Chimeras are organisms containing cells from two or more individuals.
Green glow Many of the monkey’s tissues indicate that it was created partly from a normal embryo and partly from stem cells, a method previously used only for mice and rats.
To create the chimera, scientists extracted stem cells from seven-day-old macaque blastocysts, the initial stage of the embryo. These embryonic stem cells were then grown in the laboratory and tested for pluripotency, which is the ability to transform into other types of cells to form tissues and organs.
Fluorescent protein-tagged embryos were injected into forty surrogate monkeys. Twelve monkeys became pregnant, with six pregnancies resulting in live births. In only one case was a chimera cub born. He lived for ten days - veterinarians euthanized him due to respiratory failure and hypothermia. This is the world’s first live-born primate chimera created using stem cells.
Many embedded stem cells have been found in the brain of chimera macaque monkeys, scientists hope that this will help model neurodegenerative diseases and their treatment in humans, as well as the conservation of endangered species.
“If donor cells from an endangered species are placed into an embryo, then it can be assumed that animals of this species are likely to be obtained through selection,” explained one of the study’s authors, Miguel A. Esteban of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the non-profit BGI-Research Hangzhou division of the Chinese genetics firm BGI.
“In the future, this technology could be used to produce transgenic non-human primates, which could be a critical tool for better understanding some human diseases and may play a critical role in drug discovery,” said Professor Jose Polo, director of the Adelaide Center for Epigenetics, who was not involved. while working on research.
“I think that editing macaque stem cells and then producing macaque chimeras with human genes for the disease ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) will be the highest priority,” said Muming Pu, scientific director of the CAS Neuroscience Institute.
The first chimeras
The first laboratory chimeras were produced in mice in the early 1960s, when embryologists Andrzej Tarkowski and Beatrice Mintz crossed embryos. A similar technique was then used on pigs, sheep, rabbits, cattle, rats and monkeys.
In the 1980s, another technique was developed in which stem cells were taken from one embryo and placed in another. Stem cells are the building blocks of multicellular organisms—they have the ability to divide and transform into other types of cells.
Chimeras are organisms containing cells from two or more individuals.
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