An egg during the removal of the genetic material. Image credit: Nuno Costa-Borges (CC BY 4.0)
Infertility is a growing problem that affects millions of people worldwide. Medical procedures known as in vitro fertilization (IVF) help many individuals experiencing infertility to have children. Typically in IVF, a woman’s egg cells are collected, fertilized with sperm from a chosen male and grown for a few days in a laboratory, before returning them to the woman’s body to continue to develop.
However, there are some women whose egg cells cannot develop into a healthy baby after they have been fertilized. Many of these patients use egg cells from donors, instead. This greatly improves the chances of the IVF treatment being successful, but the resultant children are not genetically related to the intended mothers.
Previous studies suggested that a cell compartment known as the cytoplasm plays a crucial role in allowing fertilized egg cells to develop normally. A new technique known as maternal spindle transfer, often shortened to MST, makes it possible to replace the entire cytoplasm of a compromised egg cell. This is achieved by transplanting the genetic material of the compromised egg cell into a donor egg cell with healthier cytoplasm that has previously had its own genetic material removed. Using this technique, it is possible to generate human egg cells for IVF that have the genetic material from the intended mother without the defects in the cytoplasm that may be responsible for infertility. However, it is not clear whether this approach would be a safe and effective way to treat infertility in humans.
Costa-Borges et al. applied MST to infertile female mice and found that the technique could permanently correct deficiencies in the cytoplasms of poor quality egg cells, allowing the mice to give birth to healthy offspring. Further experiments studied the offspring and their descendants over several generations and found that they also had higher quality egg cells and normal levels of fertility.
These findings open up the possibility of developing new treatments for infertility caused by problems with egg cells, so experiments involving human egg cells are now being performed to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of the technique.
