Stefanie M. Oppenheim S tefanie M . Education B.S. , Animal Science, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, 1990. M.S. , Animal Science, University of California, Davis, 1993. My thesis work involves investigating the maternal immunological recognition of the conceptus.
Mammalian pregnancy is a phenomenon that violates the laws of transplantation science.
Because of the paternal contribution to the genome of the conceptus, the conceptus is often regarded as an allograft in the maternal environment. However, immunological rejection of the conceptus does not normally occur within a species. The inability to create successful interspecies pregnancies without embryo manipulation has been attributed to maternal immunological rejection of the foreign conceptus. However, our lab has created sheep-goat chimeras that preferentially carry sheep pregnancies to term and abort goat pregnancies during the third trimester. These sheep-goat chimeras originate from combining a sheep embryo and a goat embryo during early development.