Commentary: Existence of Microchimerism in Pregnant Women Carrying a Boy!

Microchimerism is considered as the occurrence of small populations of cells with a diverse genetic setting within a person. tissue microchimerism is enhanced during pregnancy and is frequently associated with femaledominant autoimmune disorders, response to injury from malignancy, and transplantation effect. recently, a group of pathologists at leiden university medical center in the netherlands carried out an experiment that seemed to be doomed to failure. they performed in-situ hybridization of the y chromosome on paraffin-embedded autopsy samples of different organs collected from 26 women who died while pregnant or within one month after delivery of a son. in fact, the group was looking for male cells in female bodies. surprisingly, their search was successful. they found y chromosomes cells in each tissue samples that they analyzed. the obtained chimeras were from lung followed by spleen, liver, kidney, brain and heart.