Hex, Roku, and Chimero, Three Baby Monkeys

| December 18, 2013 | 0 Comments

this is Roku and Hex

By: Madi Davis

Three baby monkeys called Hex, Roku, and Chimero are the first chimeric monkeys in the world because they have cells from 6 rhesus monkeys.Researchers turn to monkeys to have a better insight of capabilities of embryonic stem cells because, they wanted to see if the stem cells in a monkey react the same as mice.

“The cells never fuse, but they stay together and work together to form tissues and organs,” said Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon National Primate Research Center at Oregon Health & Science University. “The possibilities for science are enormous.”  So researchers have to glue different cells from different rhesus monkeys to make the chimeric monkeys because they will never fuse together.

Chimeric monkeys have to be made in a different way than mice do.”Unfortunately that didn’t work,” Mitalipov told LiveScience in a telephone interview. “We produced offspring that way and they didn’t show any contribution of stem cells. The stem cells seemed to have gotten lost somewhere,” he said. So they need to glue the cells together so they can make the chimeric monkeys.

Hex, Roku, and Chimero are really special monkeys to be different from other monkeys. After a few years, they will go into the real world. They get to live life like the rest of us.

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