This technique has the clinical potential to eliminate the inheritance of mutations in mitochondrial DNA that cause multiple diseases in the children of parents conceiving by in-vitro fertilization.

“Through this study, we have shown that it should be possible to prevent the inheritance of mitochondrial disorders,” said Dr. Dieter Egli, co-lead author of the study which appears today in Nature. (“Nuclear Genome Transfer in Human Oocytes Eliminates Mitochondrial DNA Variants”).