The growing human male infertility rate could be offset by growing human sperm in a laboratory’s mini-testes. A group of scientists published a report in the peer-reviewed journal “Cell Stem Cell” claiming to show they are close to growing human sperm in a lab. Researchers are hoping to convert stem cells to sperm cells by exposing them to chemical signals that will do the transforming.
From the report, “… the researchers combined the human or monkey germ cells with supportive cells from mouse fetuses. Together, these cells self-organized into a three-dimensional structure called a xenogeneic reconstituted testis… What grew in this setup closely resembled both the appearance and gene activity patterns of real human germ cells during the early stages of sperm development.”
Scientists Close In on ‘Lab-Grown Sperm’ as Male Fertility Crisis Deepens– slaynews.com
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EXCERPT:
Scientists have taken a major step toward producing artificial human sperm in a laboratory as collapsing male fertility rates fuel fears that natural reproduction could eventually become impossible.
The breakthrough involved creating early-stage reproductive cells from human and monkey stem cells before growing them inside laboratory-made structures designed to imitate natural testes.
The study, published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, marks an early but significant advance toward the creation of fully developed lab-grown sperm.
Researchers Build Artificial ‘Mini-Testis’
Scientists began with induced pluripotent stem cells, known as iPSCs, taken from humans and rhesus macaques.
These blank-slate cells can be programmed to develop into almost any type of cell in the body.
Researchers exposed the cells to chemical signals that transformed them into primordial germ cell-like cells, which resemble the earliest embryonic cells that eventually develop into sperm.
Science website MedicalXpress explained how researchers then attempted to recreate the biological environment needed for those cells to mature.
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