Asking for a friend.
Seems like a question for Professor Duncan or Cosima.
If you had procreated with an opposite-sex clone and produced a child, would that child also be a clone?
Submitted 3 days ago by FenrirIII@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Comments
grehund@lemmy.world 3 days ago
HubertManne@piefed.social 3 days ago
no. each clone would produce sex cells with half the genetic information that then gets merged. so it would be in bred beyond in bred. you have one copy of a bad gene that does not express bad because you have a good copy and now there is a 25% chance the child gets two bad copies. this is a simplified explanation of course.
renormalizer@feddit.org 2 days ago
That would be a very bad idea. You’re speedrunning inbreeding: There is a 50% chance both copies of each chromosome are identical. Any gene defect on those chromosomes can’t be mitigated by an intact copy on the other, so the offspring has a much higher chance of suffering from genetic diseases. Compare that to offspring from siblings, who only have 25% chance to get the same copy from both parents.
ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
By definition, two people of different sexes can’t be clones
andrewrgross@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
I think this is mostly correct.
I think what you mean is that each chromosome has two paired arms that contain alternate versions of functionally the same content. It’s like if you had two cookbooks by different authors that had the same chapters and dishes, but different content. The two versions aren’t in the two strands of DNA, they’re in the two arms of each chromosome.
The problem is that during reproduction, each parent randomly contributes one of the two chromosomes. When each sperm and each egg is made, there’s a 50-50 chance that it gets arm 1 or arm 2 from each chromosome.
If you took a sperm cell that had received all of its content exclusively from arm 1 with an egg that contained content exclusively from arm 2, then I believe that when they fused they would produce what could be called a clone. Some might take issue and point out that the content from the arms gets mixed between the two during this process, so each arm isn’t identical to the first, but we can set that aside for now, I think. The offspring would have all the genes of the original person, and presumably would look identical to them, like a twin.
The problem is that if you were to engage in this exercise (which is tagged “selfcest” if you’re looking for erotic stories about this stuff) in real life, you’d encounter the same problem with incestual reproduction: unless the sperm and egg were prepared in a lab or using magic to ensure that each arm of each chromosome went into a different sex cell, you’d inevitably have cases where the sperm and egg both received their chromosome from the same arm. This means that the offspring wouldn’t have the full duplicated genome of the original parent; on those chromosomes, they’d have half of the parent’s full compliment of genes. And we rely on having two different copies as backups. This is why interbreeding produces birth defects and lower fitness: you miss out on backup copies.
To summarize, you wouldn’t faithfully duplicate yourself, you’d duplicate most of yourself with
So – assuming the offspring was viable – you’d kind of get a lower quality clone: the offspring would probably look like a twin of the original, but they might have worse eyesight. They might have thin, anemic blood. They might have oilier skin and hair, or dryer, itchier skin and hair.
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 3 days ago
“I like pizza, Steve!”
I hope there are others out there that still recognize and use this movie quote 30 years later.
onipa@feddit.org 3 days ago
until now, I always assumed that genes for sperm were on the Y chromosome, but I guess they’re not?
ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
The Y chromosome doesn’t carry much of anything. It’s basically just a carrier for the SRY gene, and in most cases, it’s that gene that triggers the majority of the sexual differentiation that occurs in early development. The actual “code” for what develops and how it develops is there for male and female differentiation in all humans, and it’s hormones and other factors that control whether or not that genetic code is expressed.
And in this case, we’re talking about stem cells (ie, a cell that has the potential to develop in to any cell, but hasn’t yet done so), and then artificially triggering those stem cell to develop in to sperm cells. A trick that can be done because the genetic code for it to do so is already there if the conditions are right.
As an aside, this is also why hormone replacement for trans people lets them develop secondary sexual characteristics that they wouldn’t otherwise develop. The code was already there, it just takes the right trigger to get the code expressing (in this case, hormones)
FenrirIII@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yet. Let’s have fun with the topic.
If not exactly identical, would they be like twins?
okwhateverdude@lemmy.world 3 days ago
So a fraternal twin of yourself? Pretty sure it wouldn’t be masturbation at that point, but straight up incest.
ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
The parents? Basically, as the only difference between them is a single chromosome out of the 26 we carry. There are slight genetic differences between identical twins, due to the accrual of mutations during cell division, but it’s smaller than a full different chromosome. That’s splitting hairs though, because both identical twins and our theoretical clones would be functionally identical.
If you mean the parents and their child, then they’d be somewhere between identical twin and regular sibling in terms of genetic similarity. Regular siblings on average, share about 50% DNA. Identical twins share 100% DNA. Our theoretical child in this scenario would share around 75% of their parents DNA