Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

Mothers will tell you that their children are part of them, that they share a connection that can’t be broken, no matter what distance lies between them and their children. It doesn’t matter whether their kids are still in diapers, or grown with kids of their own, the bond stays the same.

Turns out this may be more literally true than we thought.

Dads, I’m not saying you aren’t bound to your kids, or that you don’t love them as much, but there are a few things that mother nature has left up to the mom. In part, this closeness can be traced to the nine months or so that the fetus develops inside the mother, when its every movement affects her. We’ve always believed that that was all there was to it, but when we say that motherhood changes a woman, apparently it really does, on a genetic level.

You’ve probably heard of a chimaera, of the human kind, where a pair of fertilized eggs that might have gone on to be twins simply fuses instead, and as a result the offspring contains the DNA from two separate people. You’ve probably never heard of microchimaerism, but I can guarantee you know at least one person that exhibits this trait. We’ve always believed that everything a mother does while she’s pregnant can influence the resulting child, even long before science could prove it. Look up the number of superstitions regarding birth and pregnant women if you don’t believe me. Truly, the mother is a huge influence on the health and welfare of the baby, but it isn’t a one-way street.

Fetal cells are capable of crossing the placental barrier, and they do, in appreciable numbers.

Like stem cells, these cells are essentially unassigned, and can develop into whatever tissue they come in contact with. Once they settle in the mother’s body, they will divide just like her own cells. Researchers haven’t figured out yet where these cells are most likely to end up, or even exactly what purpose they serve, but it seems likely that this is part of the “bargain” between mother and child. The child needs resources, and there is a good chance that these cells help stimulate the production of those resources.

While we can’t be certain of anything yet beyond the fact that this does happen, it makes some sense that you would find these fetal cells in areas like the hypothalamus, the liver and the mammary glands, since all of these systems directly affect fetal health.

What it also means, though is that some part of the father’s DNA is now irrevocably part of the mother.

Hypothetically, then, if I had a dairy goat with average milk production, and I bred her to only males with exceptional milk production, her own milk production might rise because of the fetal cells colonizing her mammary system. While this is still in a highly theoretical state, it goes against everything we’ve come to accept as the way genetics work.

Experimentation on humans is of course a no-no, but I’m sure we’ll be seeing studies on this soon.

Cheers,

Michelle