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Comment by fcoury | Hacker News Reader

May be a dumb question but in this case which genes will the baby inherit: the mom's or the womb donor's?

Genes of the baby are 100% determined by the fertilized egg. The genes will be from whoever donated the egg. This is usually the mother in practice, but since you need to do In-Vitro Fertilization anyways, there's no fundamental reason it couldn't be someone who is genetically unrelated to either the mom or womb-donor.

Note that genetics are not 100% in control, and the conditions of the pregnancy affect the outcome of the pregnancy. We don't know the full effects of this, and we certainly don't know which aspects of it are from the womb specifically vs other biological aspects of the mother (e.g. blood chemistry). Health of the mother certainly has correlations with birth weight and developmental progress, but the extent & mechanisms are still pretty opaque.

Slight correction; the genome is 50% maternal (egg), 50% paternal (sperm).

Fertilized egg = unfertilized egg + sperm :)

Well, that read differently before.

Don't forget mtDNA. That's maternal.

Edit: usually. As for nuclear DNA, keep in mind all of the weird crossover failures that are rather common in a large population. These typically result in gene dosing problems and can lead to fetus inviability.

Then consider the epigenome, selected immune recognition, and microbiome. These can be/are environmental.

50/50 is the textbook story we teach before undergrad. It's easier to learn and still conveys the central idea of the model.

The mom. Here's the portion explaining that:

The identity of the couple in Sweden has not been released, but it is known the mother still had functioning ovaries.

The couple went through IVF to produce 11 embryos, which were frozen. Doctors at the University of Gothenburg then performed the womb transplant.

Which makes it sound like eggs from her ovaries were used for the IVF.

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