Genomic imprinting is a barrier to parthenogenesis in mammals.
Only mammals have relinquished parthenogenesis as a means of producing descendants. Bi-parental reproduction is necessary due to parent-specific epigenetic modification of the genome during gametogenesis, which leads to non-equivalent expression of imprinted genes from the maternal and paternal alleles. However, a series of our work showed that alteration of maternal imprinting by oocyte reconstruction using non-growing oocytes, together with deletion of the H19 gene provide appropriate expression of imprinted genes from the maternal genome. The resulting ng (non-growing)/fg (fully-grown) parthenogenic embryos were developed to term. Here, we discuss how the parthenogenetic embryos survived as normal individuals.
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Department of BioScience, Tokyo University of Agriculture, Tokyo, Japan. tomohiro@nodai.ac.jp
D000818:Animals; D004624:Embryo Transfer; D004622:Embryo, Mammalian / Q000502:physiology; D047108:Embryonic Development; D018392:Genomic Imprinting / Q000235:genetics*; D008322:Mammals / Q000235:genetics / Q000502:physiology*; D051379:Mice; D008954:Models, Biological; D008957:Models, Genetic; D010312:Parthenogenesis