IN a step forward for reproduction research, China announced Tuesday that it had mastered the fourth-generation of test-tube baby technology.The technology targets women who are capable of ovulation but can not produce high-quality eggs because of poor health or advanced age.The process was discovered and developed by Dr. Liu Jia’en of Wuhan University’s People’s Hospital in Central China’s Hubei Province.According to Liu, the vitality of a targeted ovum can be enhanced by replacing its ovoplasm with the healthy ovoplasm of another woman.

　　The targeted ovum becomes fertilized in vitro and then transferred to the womb of the woman seeking pregnancy.Experiments have proven that after this process of ovoplasm substitution, the targeted ovum still bears the hereditary features of the woman wanting to get pregnant and shows no change in genetic information, said Liu.With the new technology, the pregnancy success rate of women with low-quality ova is now more than 40 percent, compared with less than 10 percent using previous technologies, said Liu.Liu also developed the second-generation method of injection of a single sperm inside the ovoplasm and a third-generation diagnosis of hereditary diseases before implantation of the test-tube embryo.