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When King Minos of Crete was given a magnificent bull by the sea god Poseidon for a sacrifice, he could not bring himself to kill it. In anger, Poseidon enchanted Minos’s wife Pasiphaë to be filled with lust for the creature. The result of their trans-species mating was the bull-headed monster the Minotaur. Hybrids of humans and animals throng within myth and legend: centaurs, mermaids, goat-footed Pan. We’re both fascinated and uneasy about the.
Making gametes such as sperm and eggs from pluripotent stem cells, primitive cells that can make all the tissues, greatly contributes to efficient reproduction of livestock animals and future assisted reproductive medicine. Researchers pave the way to achieve this goal using a body of xenogenic animals.
Pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) can make all the tissues including gametes such as sperm and eggs. Researchers from the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Japan report a robust method for the generation of gametes from PSCs using the body of rats that cannot make gametes. Notably, they successfully generated mouse PSC-derived functional spermatids in rats. This approach will become a useful system for the generation of PSC-derived germ cells in the future.