The world of science is constantly evolving, especially with the aid of the technological advances we have achieved in the past few years. It is because of our progressive views of science that scientists have been able to accomplish what used to be “unthinkable”.

Scientists in China were able to breed mice successfully from two females using gene editing. These mice are called bimaternal, meaning that they only possess the genetic material of two mothers. However, the trials were not 100% error-free as not all mice pups survived the experiment. For example, when testing bipaternal (two fathers) mice, the pups only survived a few days after birth. With these unsuccessful trials, however, scientists learned invaluable information about the intricacies of mammalian reproduction. Wei Li, one of the co-authors of the study said, “we also revealed some of the most important imprinted regions that hinder the development of mice with same-sex parents, which are also interesting for studying genomic imprinting and animal cloning.”

The maternal genes were modified to act like paternal genes using CRISPR Cas9 gene editing. In essence, the CRISPR Cas9 editing process involves a bacteria that has the ability to take out a part of a gene sequence that needs to be edited, manipulate it to the desired outcome, and places it back into the DNA chain. While this technology could be utilized to save great amounts of money and time in the medical field, it raises ethical issues about the moralsof editing humans and babies. In this experiment, though, embryonic stem cells were taken from Mother A and used CRISPR Cas9 to delete the genomes of those cells. From there, the stem cells were fertilized with the sex cells of Mother B. One of the bimaternal offsprings even produced her own mice pups after she grew into adulthood.

Although this has been an incredibly eye-opening and intriguing experiment, it is not the first of its kind. In 2004, a team of Japanese scientists tried the same gene editing with two female mice parents, but it was rather unsuccessful as only one mouse out of 400 embryos developed into adulthood. This is compared to the results of the new study where 29 mice were born from 210 embryos.

Overall, this experiment is just one step further in the complex world of mammal reproduction. This research could possibly even expand its availability to humans in the future help same-sex couples have their own children. However, like many other scientific advances, this technology is still in its early developmental stages and is still being restricted to research purposes only.