Saturday, November 28, 2009

XX hybridization - are males doomed?

It seems to me that cloning just reproduces the genome, whereas sexual hybridization with haploid gametes results in diploid cells with a combinant genome...the biological mechanism that ensures diverity, variation and sucess in adapting to environmental changes.

Bacteria (and viruses) swim in an ether of pieces of nucleic acid and fragments of protein, and are able to pick up these fragments and incorporate them into their own genome - these plasmids are like the spread of memes using twitter in the twether.

So outside of the usual haploid fusion through biological whole organism mating, we humans have introduced ICS, in vivo fertilization....and in fact, we can scrub sperm of surface proteins, and even extract its genetic material and introduce that into an egg, to achieve fertilization which can then be completed through surrogate wombs.

What we have not yet done, is to take the genetic material from a diploid ovum, introduce that into another ovum and produce a diploid XX zygote. Of course, if the sperm contains the haploid X chromosome, the resulting gamete will be XX, but why not the genetic material from another ovum?

Curiously, I have not been able to find anything about this ovum-ovum hybridization idea on the Internet....my conspiracy theory friends say that first, if I can think of it, it's being done somewhere (meme theory), and secondly, that it would be done by the backing of billions of dollars guaranteeing total security (like Manhattan Project)...

Others more technical say its something about telomeres....and it will come. If and when it comes, we can see three kinds of zygotes - XY from female and male haploid cells, XX from female and male haploid cells, and XX from female and female haploid cells. Clearly, since an ovum is always X, no YY zyogtes are possible.

Will this then be the demise of the human male? The fundamental tenet of evolutionary adaptability will have been met with hybridization from two genomes - through ovum-ovum fertilization.....and any Ys of interest can be kept in the freezer for use with the same technique.

Merely a biotechnology question on my part, but there may be some social consequences if the technology is feasible.

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