Why isnt it viable to combine two “male” sperm cells together in an empty egg cell(ovum) to generate a viable embryo artificially?

Question

Considering that we used one 23Y and one 23X (Or two 23X) sperm cells to avoid a 46YY genotype,why wouldnt it work?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Mostly due to something called imprinting. There are multiple levels of genetic control. The most basic is the DNA code itself, but there are several more that most people don’t know about. When an egg or sperm cell is created those other processes make special modifications to the DNA without changing the code itself. This is called imprinting. And an X sperm cell does not have the same imprinting as an egg, so you can’t just combine an x and y sperm cell and get a baby. If you tried it often enough maybe it would work eventually but the zygote would not be viable and would abort pretty early in development.