Professor Katsuhiko Hayashi's research group at the Graduate School of Medicine, Kyushu University has succeeded in producing eggs on a culture dish from iPS cells derived from tissues in the tail of adult mice.These eggs were fertilized normally and became healthy mice.It will lead to the investigation of the cause of infertility and the development of treatment methods.This month, it was published online in the British scientific journal Nature.
The biological and medical value of eggs is extremely large, and the development of a culture system that produces eggs from pluripotent stem cells in vitro has long been desired, but so far there have been successful cases in any animal species. There wasn't.This was due to the fact that eggs are formed in a very complicated process over a long period of time, making it difficult to reproduce in in vitro culture.
This time, the 5 weeks from the primordial germ cell to the formation of an egg is divided into 3 culture periods, and the basic culture conditions (basic medium, serum concentration, growth factors, organic compounds, etc.) for about 3 years are examined for each period. As a result, we have developed a culture system that can reproduce the differentiation process from pluripotent stem cells to eggs.By using the developed egg production culture system, it was possible to produce eggs from any of ES cells, fetal cell-derived iPS cells, and adult tail-derived iPS cells.In addition, the number of eggs obtained was extremely large (about 600 to 1,000 eggs in one culture experiment).In addition, the eggs obtained by the egg production culture system developed in healthy mice when fertilized with the sperms of wild-type male mice regardless of their origin.The resulting mice grew like wild-type mice and had the ability to produce normal offspring.
Through this research, we succeeded in constructing the world's first egg production culture system that produces functional eggs.In the future, it is expected that not only the mystery of oogenesis but also the investigation of the cause of infertility and the development of treatment methods will be developed.
