Forward genetics in humans is beneficial in terms of diagnosis and treatment of genetic diseases, and discovery of gene functions. However, experimental mating is not possible among humans. In order to overcome this problem, I propose a novel experimental procedure to genetically identify human disease gene loci. To accomplish this, somatic cells from patients or their parents are reprogrammed to the pluripotent state, oogenesis is induced, the oocytes are parthenogenetically activated in the presence of cytochalasin, and embryonic stem cells are established from the parthenogenetic blastocysts. This protocol produces a set of diploid pluripotent stem cell clones having maternal and paternal chromosomes in different manners to each other. The genetic loci for the disease genes are determined through the conventional processes of positional cloning. Thus, taking advantage of the strategy proposed here, if the abnormality is reproducible using patient-derived pluripotent stem cells, a single carrier of the genetic mutations would be adequate to identify the disease gene loci.

(Communicated by Tasuku HONJO, M.J.A.)