Check Your Babys Genetic Make-Up Even before its Conceived
Published By : 14 Apr 2014 | Published By : QYRESEARCH
Parents can now get to see a glimpse of their baby’s physical characteristics and health even before it is conceived – all thanks to a new technology that can produce digital images of embryos by virtually mixing the DNA’s of two people.
This new technology, called Matchright, can help people in screening out sperm donors during medical techniques like artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization whose genes can, when combined with those of an intended mother, could increase the risks of the resulting baby inheriting any genetic disorder.
This technology, that is slated to be launched till the end of this month at two American clinics, will also shed light on health facts such as skin pigmentation, waist size and height of the baby.
This technology can be used to test an embryo for its possibilities of inheriting all those diseases that have a genetic influence.
This technology is the brainchild of GenePeeks, a company which intends to use the technology to identify hundreds of recessive conditions that are not included in the pre-screening process of a sperm bank. Rare medical conditions such as Tay-Sachs disease and cystic fibrosis are carried in children from parents who both have a mutation in a single gene of their DNA’s.
While screening DNA’s for their possibilities of containing genetically carried disorders, the DNA’s of the prospective parents are sequenced and studied in depth.
This process is taken a step further by GenePeeks – the information about DNA sequencing is fed into algorithms and genetic recombination, a process of mixing genetic data of an egg and a sperm, is digitally recreated.
This allows the close study of the genetic make-up of all embryos that can be possibly produced by mixing the egg of a woman with the sperms from all possible sperm donors, all in a virtual digital and a technically accurate manner.
In practical terms, before a woman decides to select a donor from a fertility clinic, the Matchright algorithm is run thousands of times for every donor and digital images of the resulting embryos. These embryos can thus be tested for more than 500 genetically transmitted rare diseases before the baby is even conceived.