Foetal microchimerism occurs in pigs.

Leukocytes of the mother sow were also shown a few GFP positive cells, and the second column showed that most of these GFP positive cells were CD3+ cells. We found that 0.043% of GFP positive cells were present in PBMC and 88.3% of these cells were CD3 SP + sp T cells (Figure 1G). To find out whether foetal cells could also circulate through the blood to other organs of the surrogates, we euthanized the sows after delivery and examined the presence of GFP positive cells in other organs by freezing sections (Method S5). The presence of a tiny population of foreign cells or DNA in an organism is known as microchimerism. [Extracted from the article]