The Weirdness of CRISPR
CRISPR, Gene Drive, and IPSC biotech is incredible.<p>Right now I&#x27;m killing time until my residency starts and I&#x27;ve been reading recent journal articles relating to each of these.<p>One of the weirder journal articles I read was about this one group taking fibroblasts from XX and XO (Turner&#x27;s syndrome) females and XY cells from a male and de-differntiating them into induced pluripotent stem cells. They then re-differentiated the cells into germ cells. Sure, that&#x27;s not controversial just yet, but then they decided to put the XX female germ cells into a teste. The female germ cells (XX and XO) and the male XY cells all differentiated into cells that could succesfully undergo meiosis. And these cells, could terminally become sperm. That means an XX skin cell could be induced to become a sperm and possibly fertilize an egg from another woman. Of course all offspring would be XX female. This process totally bypasses males.<p>Anyways, very interesting to me, maybe it will be to others. Here&#x27;s the journal article.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;srep06432" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;srep06432</a><p>I know this article I&#x27;m posting under is about CRISPR, but I feel like new&#x2F;controversial biology research could be posted here too. Hopefully anyone reading gets the same feeling of discovery&#x2F;wonder&#x2F;incredulity that I had when reading about it.