A five-month-old baby boy born to a Jordanian couple who has been trying to start a family for almost 20 years, is the world’s first baby to be born through a new three-parent technique, reports New Scientist.
He has DNA from three people – his mom, his dad, and an egg donor.
This was done using a new and controversial IVF technique to prevent the boy from inheriting the genes for Leigh syndrome from his mother; a fatal genetic disease which affects the developing nervous system.
These genes are passed from mother to child through the DNA of the mitochondria, the part of the cell that generates energy.
The boy’s mother had previously lost two of her children to the disease, so she sought the help of John Zhang of New Hope Fertility Center, New York.
Zhang worked on a way of avoiding the mitochondrial disease using a spindle nuclear transfer technique, a procedure he carried out in Mexico, since it is not legal in the US.
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In this technique, Zhang took the nuclear DNA from one of the mother’s eggs and inserted it into a donor egg with healthy mitochondria. The resulting egg was then fertilised with the baby’s father’s sperm.
Out of the five embryos that were created, one was implanted into the mother, which grew to become the now 5 months old and healthy baby boy who is showing no sign of disease.
Less than 1% of the baby boy’s mitochondria carry the faulty DNA, but this is thought to be too low to cause any problems. About 18 percent of mitochondria would have to be affected before problems start, the researchers told New Scientist.
More babies are expected to be born through the three-parent method in the UK, where a similar technique known as pronuclear transfer was approved in 2015. In this technique, scientists fertilize both the mother and the donor’s eggs with the father’s sperm.
The nucleus from the fertilised eggs are removed before they start dividing into embryos. Then the nucleus from the donor’s fertilised egg is discarded and replaced by the nucleus from the mother’s fertilised egg.
Source: New Scientist
