This news item is about: New research from the College of Veterinary Medicine shows that heightened levels of genomic instability can prove fatal to female embryos in mice. In the paper, published Feb. 20 in Nature, senior author and professor of genetics Dr. John Schimenti found that when DNA is damaged during its embryonic replication process, the inflammation response from the cell is much more likely to be lethal to female embryos, which do not have the intrinsic protection of testosterone that male embryos have.