Most people have two sex chromosomes, either two Xs, or an X and a Y. In addition to generating male and female physiological characteristics, sex chromosomes have a major impact on immune system function, neuronal development, disease susceptibility, and drug response, among other things. But studying the specific role of sex chromosomes is difficult, and existing tools struggle to distinguish the influence of genes from hormones. Now scientists have devised a tool to generate XX and XY cells from a person for the first time, which could help researchers understand how sex chromosomes affect disease and their role in early development. Researchers in Israel first used white blood cells collected from patients with Klinefelter disease, who were born with an extra X chromosome. Some of their cells had three sex chromosomes XXY, some had two XX, and some had XY. The researchers reprogrammed these three types of cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, resulting in genetically identical XX and XY cells, and then conducted a series of studies on them.
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