| ▲ | scotty79 3 hours ago |
| That can't be good. Life cycle of a human egg is organized around preserving mitochondria to be as young and fresh as possible across generations. Using adult cell, even a stem cell to make an egg probably gives it mitochondrial damage that usually takes hundreds of human generations to accumulate. |
|
| ▲ | treyd 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I wonder if you could coax cells from the testes back into stem cells to then re-specialize into ovarian cells. |
| |
|
| ▲ | Protostome 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Mitochondria can be translplanted/replaced. There already therapies and babies born out of these kinds of procedures |
| |
| ▲ | scotty79 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Can you point me to anything about mitochondrial transplants? I'd love to see bat mitochondria transplanted into other mammals. They must have really superior ones given the energy expenditures needed to support flight and their long lifespans. | | |
|
|
| ▲ | Jackobrien 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Really interesting point if true. Makes sense to me, and I’m sure the team is trying to solve it |
|
| ▲ | rf15 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| genuinely curious: how does any life still exist if this holds true? |
| |
| ▲ | jmcgough an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I think they're arguing that a somatic cell from an older human contains mitochondria that's more degraded. Egg cells are all created before birth, and each is pre-seeded with a large number of mitochondria. | |
| ▲ | scotty79 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | When the damage accumulates across generations the natural selection has opportunity to weed out particularly harmful instances. You can get a feeling for how important avoiding the mitochondrial damage is and how hard it is to mitigate, by looking at how fiercely the reproductive process protects them from aging. | | |
| ▲ | someonebaggy 24 minutes ago | parent [-] | | And with this you get a hundred times the damage (mutation) but still only the same amount of selection. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | khazhoux 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Instead of just dismissing this and saying this can't possibly work, it would be better to ask: how do they get around problems of mitochondrial damage, or have they not tackled that yet? Because it is unlikely that you just punched a hole through the plan of the several dozen people in bioengineering, life sciences, and other related fields that are at this company. |
| |
| ▲ | XorNot 23 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Or we could ask "what the hell are they talking about" and "can they cite even one single bit of useful peer reviewed evidence about this?" Coz really that seems like the foundational problem here: claiming something rather crazy with obvious problems, like multigenerational mitochondrial damage in an organism which replicates literally billions of them just to be born. |
|
