Chinese Groups Make Parthenogenetic hESCs

Two Chinese Groups Make Parthenogenetic hESCs Thursday, 13 December 2007 Two Chinese groups report this week, in the journal Cell Research, that they have obtained homozygous human ESC lines from a parthenogenetic oocyte, a process by which an oocyte is activated to develop without fusing with a sperm. Homozygous human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) are thought to be better cell sources for hESC banking because their histocompatibility would make it much more easy of finding matches for certain populations with relatively smaller groups of cell lines. Therefore they will be an important source of histocompatible cells and tissues for cell therapy in the future. The first group is lead by Guangxiu Lu at Central South University in Changsha, China. She has for a long period of time already worked with embryonic stem cells, and even claimed to have produced cloned human embryos several years ago. The other group is Shu-zhen Huang’s at the Institute of Medical Genetics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, together with Qi Zhou’s laboratory in Beijing at the State Key Laboratory of Reproductive Biology, Institute of Zoology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Shu-zhen Huang is known for having created human-rabbit mixed embryos some years ago. Guangxiu Lu’s groups describe one cell line, while the other group succeeded to make two different cell lines. Both groups has carefully and detailed characterized their cells and determined they are of parthenogenetic origin by several techniques. References: A highly homozygous and parthenogenetic human embryonic stem cell line derived from a one-pronuclear oocyte following in vitro fertilization procedure Ge Lin, Qi OuYang, Xiaoying Zhou, Yifan Gu, Ding Yuan, Wen Li, Gang Liu, Tiancheng Liu & Guangxiu Lu Cell Res 2007 17: 999-1007; 10.1038/cr.2007.97 Derivation of human embryonic stem cell lines from parthenogenetic blastocysts Qingyun Mai, Yang Yu, Tao Li, Liu Wang, Mei-jue Chen, Shu-zhen Huang, Canquan Zhou & Qi Zhou Cell Res 2007 17: 1008-1019; 10.1038/cr.2007.102 Comments: More new lines of human parthenogenetic embryonic stem cells Cell Research (2008) 18:215–217. doi: 10.1038/cr.2008.19; published online 4 February 2008 ......... ZenMaster

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