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Eggs removed from the last two female northern white rhinos have been fertilized with sperm from the now-dead last male, but it will be about 10 days before it's known whether the eggs have become embryos, an Italian assisted-breeding company said Monday.
"We expect some of them will develop into an embryo," Cesare Galli, a founder of Avantea and an expert in animal cloning, said.
Avantea said that only seven of 10 eggs extracted last week from the females in Kenya could be used in the fertilization attempts Sunday using frozen sperm that had been taken from the male, which died in March 2018.
Wildlife experts and veterinarians are hoping that the species can reproduce via a surrogate mother rhino.
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Scientists In Italy Fertilize 7 Northern White Rhino Eggs
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(Score: 2) by legont on Tuesday August 27 2019, @08:38PM (4 children)
Yep, but cloning offers an unlimited number of attempts. I did not mean to clone just the bull - clone all of them. It looks like a right moment to get funding.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Tuesday August 27 2019, @08:43PM (3 children)
No. No it doesn't any such thing. Cloning, as was implemented in the famous dolly, requires viable eggs, which are in exceedingly short supply for this extinct species. And for that matter, a womb at least similar enough to white rhinos not to have an immune response.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday August 28 2019, @12:37AM
The important thing is to collect the DNA sequences, and eventually someone will figure out how to create a viable synthetic egg/embryo. Even if eventually means decades or a century from now.
Sequences should be collected from as many specimens as possible to maximize genetic diversity, although that could be fudged on the computer, or inbreeding problems (which probably already exist if the population dwindled to nothing) could be corrected.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @07:21AM (1 child)
aren't they close enough to simply get a regular rhino egg, remove nucleus and implant northern white rhino cloned stem-cell nucleus thingie?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday August 28 2019, @03:55PM
What is a "regular" rhino?
There's only a few thousand Southern white rhinos and almost no black rhinos of any species left.