UniTe, Professor Loi's team saves the white rhino from extinction with artificial fertilization

TERAMO – How long does the time of the sheep Dolly or Mouflon Ombretta seem already far? So, it is true that after just over twenty years, one of the protagonists of these births, the pioneer of animal testing Pasqualino Act, is measuring up to a new challenge both alternative and winner of cloning: artificial insemination, from embryonic stem cells, able to produce oocytes and sperm in an almost unlimited number. But not only. Since the challenges are not risky enough if they are not impossible, the dual purpose is also to "cheat" nature, giving birth to a wild … wild animal. From a sheep to bear, to show that a mare can give birth to a rhinoceros. From a few hours the name of Professor Law, professor of physiology of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of UniTe, and that of his colleague Cesare Galli of the Cremonian laboratory Avantea, sign with other scientists from a group of European, Australian and Japanese work, on Nature Communications for the first time in the world, a work on the production of in vitro embryos of white rhinoceros and on the derivation of embryonic stem cells

So much for understanding: if tomorrow they had to return to the African savannahs to move specimens of white rhino, will be alone and only for the stubbornness of scientists like Law and Thomas Hildebrandt, sort of "Indiana Jones" of the Berlin Leibniz Institute who, "overcoming ethical problems at a rudimentary level", felt that their role was decisive and responsible for the reparation of the Anthropocene era. The fifth mbadive extinction bears the bloody signature of the man, for civil wars, habitat reduction, poaching, land consumption: many animal species (it remains only 104 for large mammals) have been condemned to disappear from the Earth. One of them is the northern white rhinoceros. In 1960, there were more than 2,000 specimens of this subspecies, the population decreased to 15 in 1984. Last year, in March, he was asleep forever, because irrevocably ill, Sudan, 38 years old , 2.3 tons of weight, the last male. In the Ol Pejeta Conservancy Kenyan Reserve, he left the only two females still alive, Fatu and Najin. But they are both sterile because of uterine malformations
The first rhinoceros in a test tube, hopefully, could be born at most within 5 years. These are the times of research, which now tends to another challenge in the challenge: giving birth to a wild animal from a pet. The surrogate uterus, that is to say, to grow the white rhinoceros after extinction, will be that of a mare, a larger animal more appropriate, also for advanced knowledge on his anatomy and physiology. To achieve this, however, the teramo part of the international working group will have to do research and attempts with the usual sheep. Sheep will be responsible for carrying the pregnancy of a deer whose frozen embryo is retained by the Germans. The time will be long because even though phenotypically the animal may look healthy and .. roe, it will take clinical and molecular investigations to certify the perfect result of the experiment. Even in this case, there is no precedent: in the eighties a goat was born from a sheep, but it was an event, it seems, accidental.