Two-month-old foal Kurtlookave leadsBut it's a horse
The San Diego Zoo has high hopes forthat Kurt will help make a difference for his species. It was cloned from stallion skin cells taken in 1980 and stored at Frozen Zoo, a vast repository of 10,000 cell lines from over 1,100 species and subspecies at San Diego Zoo Global.
San Diego Zoo Global is a non-profitthe organization that operates the eponymous zoo, safari park, the zoo's Conservation Research Institute and the zoo's Global Wildlife Conservation.
In this way, scientists hope to reclaim some of the gene pool that would have otherwise been lost, explains Oliver Ryder, director of genetics at San Diego Zoo Global.
This is the first time anyone has successfullycloned Przewalski's horse. Every living horse is associated with 12 wild ancestors. This does not bode well for either of these species, as it requires genetic diversity to adapt to changing habitats and fight new diseases.
The researchers were delighted to find a stallion with fragments of DNA that were largely missing from the rest of its species.
The ancestors of this particular stallion did not breedto the same extent as other Przewalski's horses, so he had rare fragments of DNA that would have been lost forever if they had not been preserved.
For 40 years, the stallion's cells have been stored infrozen at minus 160 ° C - it's colder than an evening on the planet Mercury. Now the researchers revived the cells and fused one of them with the unfertilized egg of a domesticated horse. Since the scientists removed the nucleus of the egg, which contains the mother horse's DNA, almost all of the genetic material came from the stallion.
The team then transplanted the egg backinside the horse, which acted as a surrogate mother. This is the same method that was widely used to clone Dolly Sheep in 1996 and has been used since then to clone cattle, cats, deer and horses, among other species.
Kurt was born on August 6 at the veterinary centerTexas. The scientists' plan is to eventually bring Kurt to Safari Park, where he will join 14 Przewalski's horses at the park as part of a conservation and breeding program.
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