Happy Wednesday Ungulate people! Did you know… There has been a successful cloning of a Banteng. This happened April of 2003, and was the first healthy clone of an endangered species. This was performed by scientists at Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) in Massachusetts. This was accomplished by taking frozen tissue from San Diego Zoo from a male who died in 1980, the scientists were able to insert skin cell nuclei into cow eggs. Of the 30 implanted cows, 16 became pregnant and only 2 were carried to term. One was a healthy banteng calf, the other was twice the normal birth weight and was euthanized. Even though the calf was healthy, clones will often die earlier and have problems with organs, seizures and tumors later in life. Even considering the possible problems, clones can help their wild counterparts. Banteng populations have been decreasing to only about 8,000 individuals. What cloning can do is produce genetic variability within gametes. As long as the clone can produce healthy mature gametes (simplified definition: sperm and eggs) their offspring will be normal, boosting the population. The Banteng clone was moved to San Diego shortly after birth, and lived there for seven years until it died in 2010. Learn more about Banteng on Friday for our final post! Thank you to BBC News for the pictures.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 00:30:18 +0000
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