[ad_1]
If the Northern White Rhino will be saved from extinction (all over the planet there are only two females of this species), it will also be worth Italy. The new generation of white rhinos is still a dream, but an international team of scientists – along with the Italian Cesare Galli, "daddy" from the first cloned bull Galileo and the first "photocopy" Prometea mare – is working to see the light. The first step has been taken, researchers worldwide announced in the journal Nature Communications: the first hybrid embryos were successfully created in test tubes, from white oocytes to white rhinoceroses and spermatozoa cryopreserved samples taken from males and then died.
And in the gel are now also kept the precious blastocysts, waiting to be transferred to surrogate mothers. "We plan to have the first pregnancy in a year," says AdnKronos Salute Galli, founder of Avantea, a laboratory for advanced animal reproductive technologies and biotechnology research based in Cremona. The rhinoceros gestation lasts 16 months and looks forward to the moment when the first "hybrid" puppy will come into the world. This will be the proof that it is technically possible to give the descent to the white rhinoceros of the North. Only then, when you have the certainty that all the stages of the complicated path of the rebirth will be able to go to the port, everything will be tempted for a "100% North" offspring. Meanwhile, says Thomas Hildebrandt of the Department of Reproduction Management of the German Leibniz Institute for Zoological and Wildlife Research in Berlin, the first step is a first: "These are the first in vitro rhinoceros embryos. very likely to give birth to a pregnancy once implanted in a surrogate mother. "What is? It will be the females of the South to give a hand to those of the North, bringing in their belly the little ones and making mothers in the future to a population of the North in formation. In contrast to Northern White Rhino, there are now about 21,000 specimens of southern species in southern Africa
When the scientists' work was proposed late 2017 for publication, 17 oocytes from southern rhinoceros females, "Guests" from European zoos had been fertilized with seeds of males from the same subspecies receiving 3 embryos, while 13 southern oocytes had been fertilized with the northern seed and had given 4 hybrid embryos. But the team's business has progressed and "we now have two more embryos produced with northern seeds in the last month," adds Galli. The cryopreserved embryos are in the Cremona laboratory. Researchers had to adapt the badisted reproductive technologies used in horses to the particular circumstances of rhinos and develop pioneering procedures
"In our laboratory – Galli says – we were able to develop procedures to mature oocytes, fertilize them with intracytoplasmic sperm injection (Icsi) and cultivate them. So we had for the first time rhino blastocysts – the initial stage of an embryo – developed in vitro, similar to what we usually do for cattle and horses. As the sperm from the north was of poor quality, we used an activation protocol after the ICSI. "
Source link
