World's first baby born using DNA from three parents

Fertility doctors say the world's first baby has been born using DNA from three parents in a technique hailed as "revolutionary".

The controversial "three-parent" technique allows parents with rare genetic mutations to have healthy babies.

The baby called Abrahim, whose mother and father are Jordanian, was born in Mexico with the help of a New-York based team led by Dr John Zhang.

The mother has genes for Leigh syndrome, a fatal disorder that affects the developing nervous system.

Her son was conceived from an egg containing nuclear DNA from his parents, and mitochondrial DNA from a "second" mother - an unknown female donor.

The technique has been approved in the UK - but this time it was altered slightly because as Muslims the parents were against the destruction of embryos.

The aim was to replace defective mitochondrial DNA that may have condemned Abrahim to Leigh syndrome.

About a quarter of the mother's mitochondria have the disease-causing mutation.

While she is healthy, the syndrome was responsible for the deaths of her first two children, so she sought out Dr Zhang's help.

His team carried out a technique called spindle nuclear transfer - where they removed the nucleus from one of the mother's eggs and inserted it into a donor egg that had had its own nucleus removed.

The resulting egg - with nuclear DNA from the mother and mitochondrial DNA from a donor - was then fertilised with the father's sperm.

Five embryos were created, one of which developed normally. This embryo was implanted in the mother and the child was born nine months later.

Dr Dusko Ilic, an expert from King's College London, told New Scientist magazine: "This is great news and a huge deal. It's revolutionary".

The UK-backed method, called pronuclear transfer, is where the mother's egg and a donor egg are fertilised with the father's sperm.

Each nucleus of the fertilised eggs is then removed before they divide into early-stage embryos.

The nucleus from the donor's fertilised egg is discarded and replaced by that from the mother's fertilised egg.

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