Doubts have surfaced about a landmark paper claiming that human embryos were cleared of a deadly mutation using genome editing. In an article posted to the bioRxiv preprint server on 28 August, a team of prominent stem-cell scientists and geneticists question whether the mutation was actually fixed.
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In their bioRxiv paper, [Dieter Egli, a stem-cell scientist at Columbia University in New York City, and Maria Jasin, a developmental biologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center] and their co-authors say that there is no plausible biological mechanism to explain how a genetic mutation in sperm could be corrected based on the egg’s version of the gene. More likely, they say, [reproductive biologist Shoukhrat Mitalipov’s] team failed to actually fix the mutation and were misled into thinking they had by using an inadequate genetics assay.
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“It simply says that we need to know more, not that the work is unimportant,” [developmental biologist Robin] Lovell-Badge says of Egli and Jasin’s paper.
In [a] statement, Mitalipov’s said his team stands by their results. “We will respond to their critiques point by point in the form of a formal peer-reviewed response in a matter of weeks.”
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