News my parents would never have imagined!

Scientists have produced monkeys with genetic material from two mothers, an advance that could help women with some inherited diseases have healthy children but that would raise a host of safety, legal, ethical and social questions if attempted in people

Researchers at Oregon Health amp; Science University developed a way to replace most of the genes in the eggs of one rhesus macaque monkey with genes from another monkey. They then fertilized the eggs with sperm, transferred the resulting embryos into animals' wombs and produced four apparently healthy offspring.

According to Bloomberg News, "defective mitochondria are passed only from mother to child, not from the father." Data indicate that nearly one in 4,000 births produce babies with defective mitochondria. At present, there is a technique that allows doctors to assess the egg cells of women with mitochondrial diseases and pick the healthiest ones to use with in vitro fertilization procedures. Still, some women do not have any "adequate egg cells," a fact that inspired the Oregon team to devise a way to "replace defective DNA in the mitochondria

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Gene Therapy Creates a New Fovea

Gene therapy for an inherited form of blindness shows promise, a U.S. study shows.

According to a study published in the Aug. online edition of Human Gene Therapy and in a letter to the editor in the Aug. 13 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, experimental gene therapy appeared to improve vision in three patients with Leber congenital amaurosis. In this condition an abnormal protein in sufferers' photoreceptors severely impairs their sensitivity to light. "It's like wearing several pairs of sunglasses in a dark room," says Artur Cideciyan, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who oversaw the trial

For the study, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania injected a gene encoding a functional copy of a light-sensitivity protein into a small part of one eye of three patients, all in their twenties and blind since birth. Three months after treatment, all three patients showed substantial improvements in their ability to detect light. Notably, one year after treatment, one patient discovered that she could read an illuminated clock in the family car for the first time in her life.

The authors suggested that the brain can adapt to new sensory capacity, even in people who have been blind since birth

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Genetic Link To Age-related Cataracts Uncovered

Researchers from Case Western Reserve University have identified the EphA2 gene, which is associated with the formation of age-related cataract, a leading cause of blindness.



The gene encodes an enzyme that plays a role in the repair of damaged proteins in the eye. Expression of the EphA2 gene decreases with age, which means damaged proteins can clump together and cause the eye lens to become cloudy, resulting in obscured vision, according to the study in the July 31 issue of the journal PLoS Genetics

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