Towards clinical application of pronuclear transfer to prevent mitochondrial DNA disease
Nature. 2016 Jun 16;534(7607):383-6.
Hyslop LA, Blakeley P, Craven L, Richardson J, Fogarty NM, Fragouli E, Lamb M, Wamaitha SE, Prathalingam N, Zhang Q, O'Keefe H, Takeda Y, Arizzi L, Alfarawati S, Tuppen HA, Irving L, Kalleas D, Choudhary M, Wells D, Murdoch AP, Turnbull DM, Niakan KK, Herbert M.
Abstract
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations are maternally inherited and are associated with a broad range of debilitating and fatal diseases1. Reproductive technologies designed to uncouple the inheritance of mtDNA from nuclear DNA may enable affected women to have a genetically related child with a greatly reduced risk of mtDNA disease. Here we report the first preclinical studies on pronuclear transplantation (PNT). Surprisingly, techniques used in proof of concept studies involving abnormally fertilized human zygotes2 were not well tolerated by normally fertilized zygotes. We have therefore developed an alternative approach based on transplanting pronuclei shortly after completion of meiosis rather than shortly before the first mitotic division. This promotes efficient development to the blastocyst stage with no detectable effect on aneuploidy or gene expression. Following optimisation, mtDNA carryover was reduced to <2% in the majority (79%) of PNT blastocysts. The importance of reducing carryover to the lowest possible levels is highlighted by a progressive increase in heteroplasmy in a stem cell line derived from a PNT blastocyst with 4% mtDNA carryover. We conclude that PNT has the potential to reduce the risk of mtDNA disease, but it may not guarantee prevention.
Abstract Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27281217
Towards clinical application of pronuclear transfer to prevent mitochondrial DNA disease.
Hyslop LA, Blakeley P, Craven L, Richardson J, Fogarty NM, Fragouli E, Lamb M, Wamaitha SE, Prathalingam N, Zhang Q, O'Keefe H, Takeda Y, Arizzi L, Alfarawati S, Tuppen HA, Irving L, Kalleas D, Choudhary M, Wells D, Murdoch AP, Turnbull DM, Niakan KK, Herbert M.
Nature. 2016 Jun 16;534(7607):383-6. doi: 10.1038/nature18303. Epub 2016 Jun 8. Erratum in: Nature. 2016 Oct 27;538(7626):542.
PMID: 27281217