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[Posted: Tue 11/07/2006]

A new scientific breakthrough may lead to women in future being able to produce sperm.

Scientists in England have turned stem cells from am embryo into sperm which are capable of producing offspring.

The breakthrough is likely to lead to new advances in treating male infertility and even the possibility that women could manufacture sperm.

The researchers at Newcastle University say that the advance, when developed further, could help men with certain types of infertility to become fertile and even one day could enable a lesbian couple to have children that genetically would be their own.

The experiment used embryo cells to produce seven baby mice, six of whom lived into adulthood, although the survivors suffered adverse events of the kind seen in cloning experiments.

The researchers isolated embryonic stem cells from an embryo only a few days old consisting of a cluster of cells. The cells were grown in a laboratory and screened to isolate the spermatogonial stem calls which were grown and then injected into female mouse eggs and grown in early stage embryos.

The research team says its project will aid the understanding of the biological process through which sperm is produced, which should help in the future treatment of infertility.

It is hoped that this new knowledge could be translated into treatments for men whose sperm is dysfunctional, although could be some years into the future.

The research was published in the journal Developmental Cell.