By cloning a black-footed ferret that died in 1988, biologists hope to add greater genetic diversity to the existing population of this endangered species. NewsfromScience
) in 2001, and the banteng in 2003. In 2015, scientists cloned a fourth endangered species, a sheep known as the Esfahan mouflon . All died fairly young , and produced no offspring.
Some conservationists have other concerns. They worry the ability to clone a rare species might undermine support for efforts to protect habitat and keep species alive in the wild. And cloning can be expensive, potentially diverting funds from other conservation activities. In late 2020, the team implanted Willa-based embryos into three domestic ferrets and shipped them to the National Blackfooted Ferret Conservation Center in Colorado, where about two-thirds of the nation’s captive population lives. To their relief, one ferret gave birth to Elizabeth Ann on 10 December 2020. “It was very exciting,” says Robyn Bortner, captive breeding manager at the facility, who was in the room when the clone was born.
At the San Diego Frozen Zoo, the cells of numerous endangered species are preserved in liquid nitrogen. Cloning a mammal was not yet feasible when the zoo banked cells from two black-footed ferrets in the 1980s.Successfully adding Willa’s genes to the black-footed ferret gene pool via Elizabeth Ann would likely “pack this huge biodiversity punch,” Novak says. Genomic analysis has found Willa’s DNA has 10 times more unique alleles than DNA from any captive-bred ferret.
Still, efforts to clone at least two other endangered species are underway. One is the Przewalski’s horse , a stocky wild horse that once roamed across Europe and Asia. The species nearly went extinct in the mid–20th century, and all individuals alive today are descended from just 12 animals. Luckily, nearly 300 cell lines have been stashed at the Frozen Zoo, and conservationists are now trying to inject some of that lost genetic diversity into the modern population.
Some researchers are looking beyond cloning, to other genetic technologies that might help endangered species. Birds, for example, can’t be cloned, but Revive & Restore recently formed a research consortium to develop a technique that could fill a similar role. It involves introducing primordial germ cells from an endangered species into an embryo of a surrogate species, such as a chicken. These germ cells then migrate to the chicken’s gonads and become sex cells.
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