Chimeras

We will be hearing more and more about chimeras.  In genetics, a chimera is an animal that has two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells that originated in different zygotes(ref).    The word was adopted from Greek mythology where the description is more colorful and gets down to the nitty-gritty.  According to Wikipedia  “the Chimera (Greek Χίμαιρα (Chímaira); Latin Chimaera) was a monstrous fire-breathing creature of Lycia in Asia Minor, composed of the parts of multiple animals: upon the body of a lion with a tail that terminated in a snake’s head, the head of a goat arose on its back at the center of its spine. The Chimera was one of the offspring of Typhon and Echidna and a sibling of such monsters as Cerberus and the Lernaean Hydra.”  Get the idea?

The news this week was two reports from Chinese researchers of making chimeric mice using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).  The mice were made by taking skin cells from mice, reverting these cells to iPSC status where they become virtually identical to embryonic stem cells (see the blog post Rebooting cells and longevity), and injecting them back into into eary-stage mouse embryos.  On of the reasons this work is important is that it established the true pluripotency of the iPSCs used.  After all, if you can make a whole living mouse out of them, they must be capable of differentiating into any mouse tissue.  “The generally accepted “gold standard” for determining whether a mouse iPSC line has been fully reprogrammed is to show that when injected into an early embryo (or blastocyst), the iPSCs can contribute to many different tissues in the resulting chimeric mouse, including the germline(ref).”  One of the chimeric mice made this way is reported to have mated with a normal mouse resulting in the birth of a normal mouse pup. Of course this is all on the level of the mouse.  Ethical and legal considerations are in the way of making chimeric “designer people,” but the results still give hope that iPSCs can be used for any purpose embryonic stem cells (eSCs) could be used for.

However, other stem cell research reported earlier this month indicates that the gene expression profiles of iPSCs and eSCs are different.  The study compared eSCs and iPSCs made by reprogramming skin cells. “The data from the study suggest that embryonic stem cells and the reprogrammed cells, known as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, have overlapping but still distinct gene expression signatures. The differing signatures were evident regardless of where the cell lines were generated, the methods by which they were derived or the species from which they were isolated(ref).”  The researchers do not know what the practical implications of this finding are.  Whatever they are, they seem to be not enough to get in the way of making whole living chimeric mice. 

Chimeras, hybrid animals, have been around for some time and are interesting curiosities. According to Wikipedia “Chimeras are formed from four parent cells (two fertilized eggs or early embryos fused together) or from three parent cells (a fertilized egg is fused with an unfertilized egg or a fertilized egg is fused with an extra sperm). Each population of cells keeps its own character and the resulting animal is a mixture of tissues.”  Moreover people may be chimeras and not know it.  As the organism develops, the resulting chimera can come to possess organs that have different sets of chromosomes. For example, the chimera may have a liver composed of cells with one set of chromosomes and have a kidney composed of cells with a second set of chromosomes. This has occurred in humans, and at one time was thought to be extremely rare, though more recent evidence suggests that it is not as rare as previously believed. Most will go through life without realizing they are chimeras. The difference in phenotypes may be subtle (e.g., having a hitchhiker’s thumb and a straight thumb, eyes of slightly different colors, differential hair growth on opposite sides of the body, etc) or completely undetectable . Another telltale of a person being a chimera is visible Blaschko’s lines(ref).”

About Vince Giuliano

Being a follower, connoisseur, and interpreter of longevity research is my latest career, since 2007. I believe I am unique among the researchers and writers in the aging sciences community in one critical respect. That is, I personally practice the anti-aging interventions that I preach and that has kept me healthy, young, active and highly involved at my age, now 93. I am as productive as I was at age 45. I don’t know of anybody else active in that community in my age bracket. In particular, I have focused on the importance of controlling chronic inflammation for healthy aging, and have written a number of articles on that subject in this blog. In 2014, I created a dietary supplement to further this objective. In 2019, two family colleagues and I started up Synergy Bioherbals, a dietary supplement company that is now selling this product. In earlier reincarnations of my career. I was Founding Dean of a graduate school and a full University Professor at the State University of New York, a senior consultant working in a variety of fields at Arthur D. Little, Inc., Chief Scientist and C00 of Mirror Systems, a software company, and an international Internet consultant. I got off the ground with one of the earliest PhD's from Harvard in a field later to become known as computer science. Because there was no academic field of computer science at the time, to get through I had to qualify myself in hard sciences, so my studies focused heavily on quantum physics. In various ways I contributed to the Computer Revolution starting in the 1950s and the Internet Revolution starting in the late 1980s. I am now engaged in doing the same for The Longevity Revolution. I have published something like 200 books and papers as well as over 430 substantive.entries in this blog, and have enjoyed various periods of notoriety. If you do a Google search on Vincent E. Giuliano, most if not all of the entries on the first few pages that come up will be ones relating to me. I have a general writings site at www.vincegiuliano.com and an extensive site of my art at www.giulianoart.com. Please note that I have recently changed my mailbox to vegiuliano@agingsciences.com.
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