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Test-tube embryos may save northern white rhinos
Why it is in news?
- Months after the death of Sudan, the world’s last male northern white rhino (NWR), scientists have grown embryos containing DNA of his kind, hoping to save the subspecies from extinction.
- With only two northern white rhinos known to be alive today — both infertile females — the team hopes their novel technique will lead to the re-establishment of a viable breeding population.
- The team’s work, using a recently-patented, two-metre egg extraction device, resulted in the first-ever test tube-produced rhino embryos.
- The hybrid embryos were created with frozen sperm from dead NWR males and the eggs of southern white rhino (SWR) females, of which there are thousands left on Earth.
- The eggs were harvested from rhinos in European zoos.
- The team now hopes to use the technique to collect eggs from the last two northern white rhinos living in a Kenyan national park.
- The results indicate that ART (assisted reproduction techniques) could be a viable strategy to rescue genes from the iconic, almost extinct, northern white rhinoceros.
Challenges
- The procedure is not without risk: they have to do a full anaesthesia, the animal is down for two hours, and it is quite a risky situation for the last two of their kind.
- Impressive results in a Petri dish don’t easily translate into a herd of healthy offspring.
- There is no prior experience (examples to learn from) as far as ART is concerned.
Source
The Hindu