Researchers at Oregon Health and Science University transferred the nucleus of a human skin cell into a human egg cell stripped of its own genetic material, then triggered the hybrid to divide, hoping the egg's machinery would force the skin cell's genome to shed chromosomes as meiosis does.
The approach, which the team called mitomeiosis, successfully induced the transplanted skin-cell genome to divide, and the resulting cells retained an average of 23 chromosomes, roughly the reduced count expected of a mature human egg, down from the 46 a skin cell normally carries.
The chromosomes were not sorted with the precision of natural meiosis, so the resulting cells are an early proof of concept toward lab-made eggs from a body cell, not functional eggs themselves, and when fertilized, fewer than one in ten became early embryos, all with chromosome errors. The result came from a single lab and has not been replicated, and any path to a usable treatment for infertility is still distant.
Read the original study
Marti Gutierrez et al., Nature Communications, 2025 · doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-63454-7
A skin cell, pushed halfway toward an egg.
Source
- Marti Gutierrez, N., Mikhalchenko, A., Shishimorova, M., Frana, D., Van Dyken, C., Li, Y., Ma, H., Koski, A., Liang, D., Lee, S.-G., Eyberg, D., Safaei, Z., Kang, E., Lee, Y., O'Leary, T., Lee, D., Krieg, S., Wu, D., Rubin, E., . . . Mitalipov, S. (2025). Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy. Nature Communications, 16(1), 8340. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-63454-7