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Source: UNILAD

According to a Nature report, Professor Katsuhiko Hayashi, a Japanese scientist at Kyushu University, has developed a method for converting male mice skin cells into pluripotent stem cells, which can possibly evolve into many types of cells or tissues.

Professor Hayashi and his colleagues then cultivated these cells in the presence of a medication that turned male rodent stem cells into female cells capable of producing viable egg cells.

“This is the first case of making robust mammalian oocytes from male cells,” said Dr. Hayashi of the study.

And, given this recent success, he predicted that he might replicate this procedure in people within the next five years.

Because the scientists were able to create egg-like cells from two male mice, it opens up the possibility of same-sex couples and their reproduction options.

“It’s a very clever strategy,” Diana Laird, a stem cell and reproductive expert at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study, said.