A team of scientists from the Shanghai Naval Medical University (China) have published the results of their research in which they managed to get a male mouse to give birth by cesarean section after an experiment that involved mating it to a female mouse and transplanting its uterus . According to experts, this experiment could have “a profound impact on reproductive biology.”
Male and female, in a single creature
Specifically, the union (reminiscent of Frankenstein) of a male and female mouse joining their skin and sharing their blood, happened by transplanting a uterus into the male and also by implanting embryos in male and female rats. Scientists hoped that the blood of a pregnant female would help the male to have offspring.
The team used inbred Lewis mice, which are 21-23 days gestation , with groups of female rats selected for their uterus or to develop the initial embryo.
The results showed that the embryos developed to term, that is, 21.5 days depending on the gestation of the rodents, and they managed to obtain ten successful offspring from 27 “normal” embryos from male mice.
The baby mice managed to live to adulthood and also managed to reproduce without any ill effects on the animals. They had no obvious abnormalities in the heart, lung, liver, kidney, brain, testes, ovary, or uterus, based on a histological examination.
Pregnancy in males is a very rare phenomenon in nature
Male pregnancy is a unique phenomenon in signatids (such as the seahorse or the water dragon), which refers to the incubation of embryos or fetuses by males. However, it remains a mystery whether male mammalian animals have the potential to conceive and become pregnant.
The study built on previous experiments in which mouse embryos were implanted in other parts of the male body, not in the uterus, but only developed for a short period of time. These new “mouse models” removed these restrictions by creating a single joint entity capable of giving birth.
“In this study, we built a male mouse model capable of becoming pregnant and found that transplanted embryos could develop to adulthood in the grafted wombs of males [attached to a female] during exposure to the pregnant female’s blood. The success rate of the entire experiment was very low, but 10 pups were successfully delivered to males via cesarean section, ”the Chinese researchers explain.
critics
The West has not welcomed this experiment . Some researchers question the usefulness of experiments that use these highly artificial conditions and in which animals are treated as disposable objects, and the authors garnered so much rejection from the scientific community and the general public that they have requested that the study be withdrawn from the server. prepress. For now, the prepress service remains available.
Referencia: A rat model of pregnancy in the male parabiont
Rongjia Zhang, Yuhuan Liu
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.06.09.447686
