Answer from: Halyna Strelko, MD
Pronucleus is the stage of embryo development, the first day after fertilization. If Monday we have egg collection Tuesday, we have pronuclear stage – it means that male and female nucleus joined and from this moment this is the new life, new embryo and it starts the division, the cleavage, the embryo formation and this pronucleus, now we know how to manipulate with them and in some difficult cases when we have embryo arrest or some late reproductive age, we can take these two pronucleus from cytoplasm of patient and put in cytoplasm of donor egg and as donor egg has much more mitochondria, less damage because on some free radicals, it may give much more potential to these pronucleus to develop till blastocyst stage. That’s why we are talking about pronuclear transfer. It is an experimental technique but we are controlling when we reach the blastocyst stage after this technique. Normally, we are doing NGS testing of embryos, measuring the number of chromosomes and if all is fine, we are doing the transfer.
Nobody now can tell what will happen with 20 years’ perspective but probably nothing special. It is a very recent technique, it’s existed for a couple of years so, impossible to say what will be after but it seems that nothing specific we will have with this technique.
