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Published online 11 April 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.362
News
Making new eggs in old mice
A textbook-challenging finding revives debates about extending female fertility.
Researchers in China today announced a discovery that challenges a canonical belief in reproductive biology: that women are born with a set number of immature egg cells, called oocytes, which become depleted with age. In a paper in Nature Cell Biology,1 the Chinese team reports that it has found precursors to oocytes in adult mice.
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This doesn't appear to be news - http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v428/n6979/abs/nature02316.html
Thanks for the comment, Warren Francis. I mentioned Tilly and Johnson's work pretty prominently within. They spurred much debate, and one of the missing links was that they failed to provide evidence that what the mice were producing were actually functional eggs. I.e. they could not produce a pregnancy. Even in follow up work, bone marrow transplants that revived fertility in sterilized mice did not produce the actual offspring. The babies were biologically related to their formerly sterilized mothers. This is reviewed, albeit from Tilly's perspective, in reference 2. The news here, is that the offspring appear related to the transplanted cells. Sorry that was not more obvious.
Why is it so difficult to post a link to an article in your own family of journals?