Could Real Life Hybrids Like Goat-Lions And Mermaids Possibly Exist - Chimeras

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Some of us probably might have heard of an ancient Greek myth about a monstrous fire-breathing hybrid creature called '' Chimera '', It is a lion with two heads (goat and lion) and a tail with snake head at it's end. We should however notice that this creature is a combination of three different organisms fused into one entity, likewise the mermaid (fish-woman), found in our folk tales.

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These kind of creatures in modern times are generally referred to as '' Chimeras '' . Scientifically, chimeras are hybrid organisms with DNAs from different organisms fused together. However, do such creatures exist ? or can they possibly exit ?. This is what we are about to find out.

There have been cases of chimerism observed in animals including humans, one such case is hermaphroditism - an individual possessing both male and female biological characteristics. Chimerism is one of the many causes of hermaphroditism, the kind of hermaphroditism caused by chimerism has the property of the affected individual having two different DNA structures and it is such that when the individual has a normal offspring (ideally), there could be mismatch between the affected individuals DNA and that of the offspring which would indeed depend on what part of the affected individual the DNA samples were gotten from.
There has been a reported case somewhat related to the DNA mismatch scenario, in this case however it was not hermaphroditism that was caused by chimerism, it was another cause of chimerism and the story goes like this .
In the year 2002, there was a certain woman by the name Karen Keegan who needed to do a kidney transplant and was required to undergo a histocompatibility DNA test with her three children in order for the transplant to take place using the kidney from one of her children, it was discovered that there was a mismatch between her DNA and two of her sons, thus resulting in the belief that she wasn't the biological mother of the two sons . However after thorough investigation, it was discovered that she was a chimera - she had two different DNAs, and was actually the biological mother of the sons ( matching DNA samples were gotten from another part of her body).

Well this kind of chimerism is not that awesome, how about the goat-lion or mermaid chimeras. Truth be to be told, scientists have begun experimenting on ways to produce such kinds of chimeras. One such experiment was carried out in 2017 and the resulting chimera was called Human-Pig chimera, according to the experiment the gene(contains the DNA) of a day old Pig embryo is edited, that is information about a particular organ say, liver is removed - so that the Pig does not develop a Pig liver and information about human liver is put in replacement, in the gene - pig now develops a human liver, and later the edited embryo is put back in the mother pig for natural development.
Another experiment similar to this was carried out of recent and the resulting chimera is called the Human-Monkey chimera. However despite the success in editing the gene of these organisms, the organisms have refused to survive past at most 28 days of development and is due mainly to ethical issues.
The major reason for producing this chimeras as they said is not to create monsters, but rather seek solutions to vexing medical issues like organ transplant (instead of collecting organs from fellow humans which could be dangerous, it's best we collect our kind of organ from the edited animals) as well as understanding early human developments, disease and ageing.