Aggregated News
A novel kind of test tube reproduction is to be used to help save one of the world's rarest animals - the northern white rhino - which is on the brink of extinction with few, if any, individuals left in the wild.
Cloning has been used before in efforts to help preserve endangered wildcats, ox and sheep but the method is controversial because it is very inefficient and conservationists also believe it is a distraction from the underlying problem of preserving wild habitats.
Now the Institute for Breeding Rare and Endangered African Mammals in Edinburgh has approached Dr Thomas Hildebrandt at Berlin Zoo and Sir Ian Wilmut' and Dr Paul De Sousa at the University of Edinburgh to find a way to test an alternative to conventional cloning methods that could help northern white rhino repopulate the grasslands of north-east Africa.
As first reported by the Telegraph, Sir Ian has abandoned the method used by his team to clone Dolly the sheep more than a decade ago to obtain embryo cells and is now pursuing a Japanese method that, by...
Cloning has been used before in efforts to help preserve endangered wildcats, ox and sheep but the method is controversial because it is very inefficient and conservationists also believe it is a distraction from the underlying problem of preserving wild habitats.
Now the Institute for Breeding Rare and Endangered African Mammals in Edinburgh has approached Dr Thomas Hildebrandt at Berlin Zoo and Sir Ian Wilmut' and Dr Paul De Sousa at the University of Edinburgh to find a way to test an alternative to conventional cloning methods that could help northern white rhino repopulate the grasslands of north-east Africa.
As first reported by the Telegraph, Sir Ian has abandoned the method used by his team to clone Dolly the sheep more than a decade ago to obtain embryo cells and is now pursuing a Japanese method that, by...