![]() Once in the mother's blood, these cells circulate in the body and lodge themselves in tissue. Like stem cells, fetal cells are pluripotent, which means they can grow into many kinds of tissue. Things get even more intriguing when fetal cells cross the placenta and enter the mother's bloodstream. ![]() The mother's body in turn has evolved countermeasures to prevent excessive resource flow. Over evolutionary time, the fetus has evolved to manipulate the mother's physiology and increase the transfer of resources like nutrition and heat to the developing child. Maternal-fetal conflict has its origins with the very first placental mammals millions of years ago. “What we are hoping to do is not only provide an evolutionary framework for understanding how and why microchimerism came to be, but also to assess how this affects health,” says lead author Amy Boddy, a geneticist at Arizona State University. Now a team of biologists argues that to really understand what microchimerism does to moms, we need to figure out why it evolved in the first place. The phenomenon is widespread among mammals, and scientists have proposed a number of theories for how it affects the mother, from better wound healing to higher risk of cancer. This cellular invasion means that mothers carry unique genetic material from their children’s bodies, creating what biologists call a microchimera, named after the legendary beasts made of different animals. During pregnancy, cells from the fetus cross the placenta and enter the mother's body, where they can become part of her tissues. Mothers around the world say they feel like their children are still a part of them long after they've given birth.
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