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Can you turn teeth into sperm?

9 July 2008

COULD sacrificing a tooth enable some infertile men to father children? That’s the goal of researchers in Brazil, who suggest that stem cells from human teeth can be coaxed into becoming sperm by being injected into the testes of mice.

Irina Kerkis of the Butantan Institute in São Paulo and her colleagues injected stem cells from the dental pulp of human teeth into the testes of live mice. The cells seemed to migrate to the tubules where sperm usually mature and differentiate into cells resembling human sperm.

“The tooth stem cells seemed to migrate to the tubules where sperm usually mature”…

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