Extinct Pyrenean Ibex Cloned 249
jamie points out a story in the Telegraph about a project to clone the Pyrenean Ibex (known also as bucardo), a species that went extinct in 2000. Before the last known member of the species died, scientists took tissue samples to begin a project to clone the animal. "Using techniques similar to those used to clone Dolly the sheep, known as nuclear transfer, the researchers were able to transplant DNA from the tissue into eggs taken from domestic goats to create 439 embryos, of which 57 were implanted into surrogate females. " Now, for the first time, one of them has survived the gestation period, living for seven minutes after birth. One of the researchers said, "The delivered kid was genetically identical to the bucardo. In species such as bucardo, cloning is the only possibility to avoid its complete disappearance."
NOT CLONES! NOT CLONES (Score:4, Informative)
If his noodliness had intended mankind to clone things, he would have just left us at the amoeba stage.
Other cloned critters (Score:5, Informative)
There was an article along these lines in New Scientist a couple of week ago, looking at the availability of DNA and the availability of modern host species. Some are fairly good, like tasmanian tigers, which have lots of tissue samples available and a good candidate for a host, the anything-but-extinct tasmanian devil. Marsupials also have very short gestation, with the embryo completing its development in the mother's pouch.
Other are farther out, like the dodo (no good DNA samples), the woolly rhinoceros (lots of DNA, the modern host is itself seriously endangered), and so on. One extinct species of armadillo would be the size of a VW Beetle. Even if you had DNA, no modern armadillo or related creature is anywhere nearly big enough.
...laura
Yeah ... (Score:2, Informative)
Historically, that is how we've judged the success of cloning, or genetically manipulated animals. A lot has to happen after fertilization -- blastulation, gastrulation, then further development, any one of those can be considered a success. Early cloning experiments with the common frog (Rana pippens) were considered successful because the made it to the gasturla stage, another frog species formed viable embryos, but not frogs, and was still a success. Dolly surviving well into adulthood was a fluke, and she still died early, of something that might have had a genetic cause. It really is all how you care to define success. If you thought we were a few years away from re-creating Jurassic Park, or someone promised you a harem of 50 Jessica Alba clones in a few years time, yeah, this is a very disappointing story for you.
Inbred sheep (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How fast are they? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Know I'm just a simple (Score:2, Informative)
The kind of eggs you find in ovaries, not the kind you'd put in an omelet. Geez.
Re:7 minutes! (Score:5, Informative)
Because of the extreme rarity of the white tiger allele in the wild, the breeding pool is limited to the small number of white tigers in captivity, which additionally all descend from a common ancestor. Inbreeding between these tigers often leads to defects. Due to the high market value for white tigers, unscrupulous breeders will still inbreed white tigers to ensure the offspring also exhibit the recessive gene. Some animal rights activists have called for a halt to the breeding of white tigers altogether.
Breeding from a single very genetically similar pair results in a much higher than normal rate of genetic defects, but can still produce enough viable offspring to start the process going.
I think the general "you'd need 100 breeding couples to start a human colony" statement generally has an unspoken "unless you want 1 in 10 children to be born with serious congenital defects". It doesn't mean that the colony can't survive though.
Re:HUMANS: - (Score:1, Informative)
bizarre gook remedies
You may have had a point, but your use of racist slang detracts from it and makes you look partially retarded.
Just a heads up.
Re:7 minutes! (Score:5, Informative)
Wellllll ... there's a substantial kernel of truth in there, but the reality is not as clearly cut as you (or your sources) make out. It's true that isolated breeding populations of very small size do tend to have problems with consanguinity and relatively high rates of expression of deleterious mutations, but on the flip side of that, the small population size means that the population can genetically drift much faster than a larger population can. So, if the small population "comes up with" new phenotypes (short hand for something more like "selects from randomly-presented combinations of established and mutated genes", but considerably longer) which are well adapted to their isolated environment, they can achieve local dominance rapidly.
How small those populations are ... is a very moot point, and almost certainly the numbers are different for different genera (since this process is a common route of speciation, it's pointless to talk at a species level).
An example - within living memory, the island of St.Kilda [wikipedia.org] (60-some km west of the western Hebrides) was abandoned by it's human population, with consanguinity being cited as one of their major concerns. The population at the time of evacuation was 36 people (though the population profile would have been abnormal, having lost many of it's younger members in recent years). We can take this as an estimate of somewhat below the minimum population size necessary for an isolated human population. In contrast, before World War I the population seems to have been more-or-less stable in the high 70s or low 80s. Granted this is not an entirely isolated population, but it does give an indication. Perhaps better or more numerous data is available from the more numerous small Pacific Ocean islands, but again they're not entirely isolated.
In contrast, a recent report (I don't have the reference with me, but it was quite widely reported) of an isolated wolf pack in southern Sweden showed that it was suffering severely from inbreeding with around 8 members. But in contrast the appearance of a single unrelated individual male wolf in the late 1990s (IIRC) practically reversed the long-term decline of the pack. This suggests that the viable minimum population size for canines may be as low as the dozens.
Excluding social factors, the number of pairings available in a population 'n' scales as (n^2-n)/4 ; if pairings are not lifelong ... well, you get the picture.
For the SF fan - it's never puzzled me why the "colony world" type of story sticks (more or less) to monogamous couples and nuclear families (it's a fictional device), I suspect that in a real-world scenario that couldn't be allowed. What sort of a solution would have to be brought up, I don't know. Maybe the women starting pregnancies alternately by natural means and by IVF "from the egg and sperm banks, at random". But I suspect that "something would have to be done" to get the population gene pool bigger, faster.
For the anthropologist ... there's a scenario about Australia (or any random non-African continent) being colonised by a single woman, pregnant with a male foetus, being blown on a raft/ boat/ flood debris raft across from Indonesia. Not impossible, but decidedly implausible. Individuals getting blown off course in small coast-hugger boats, landing on the Australia shore at intervals of less than (say) a decade, and eventually two of opposite sexes surviving for long enough to meet ... that seems much more credible. And a decade later, another human arrives, and a decade later, another arrives. Pretty soon, you've got a substantial colony (I make it less than a century to reach a population of about 30 adults even with some fairly pessimistic assumptions about mortality rates).
Re:NOT CLONES! NOT CLONES (Score:3, Informative)
The mitochondrial DNA used to create the new egg and with that the "clone" is from a different, albeit related species. So the end-result I think is actually yet another species. Mitochondrial DNA has serious influence on the outcome. Maybe that is even what caused the death of the baby immediately after birth. Too much of a DNA mismatch.