A baby with three parents who was born in Mexico has been making headlines. The baby was created by injecting mitochondrial DNA from a donor into the mother's egg. The baby is a ray of hope for women who suffer from genetic mutations that affect their fertility and cause miscarriages.
On Tuesday, US scientists revealed a new technique called mitochondrial transfer to include DNA from three people in the creation of test-tube babies. New Scientist broke the news in a report on Tuesday. Referring to the breakthrough, Dr Dusko Ilic at King's College London said that it was "great news and a huge deal."
The world's first baby to be born with DNA from three parents is a five-month-old boy. The boy's mother has a rare genetic mutation called Leigh syndrome which is present in her mitochondrial DNA and has already caused her two miscarriages.
The woman was treated by a US-based team after the couple traveled to Mexico. John Zhang and his team from the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City helped then to have a baby genetically related to them but without the inherited disease.
For this procedure, Zhang used the nucleus from one of the mother's eggs that he injected into a donor egg, in a technique known as spindle nuclear transfer. The resulting egg with the nuclear DNA of the mother combined with mitochondria from the donated egg was then fertilized by the father's sperm and implanted in the mother's womb.
Although the couple would have preferred to undergo the procedure in the US, authorities have not yet approved the controversial new technique. Therefore, Zhang traveled to Mexico instead to carry out the procedure.
Meanwhile, experts in the field are calling for the procedure to be studied thoroughly before it is given the green signal. Justin St John, Professor and Director of the Centre for Genetic Diseases at Monash University, is of the opinion that since the technology is controversial, the investigators submitted a manuscript for full peer review.