No kidding: Extinct mountain goat could be 'cloned' back to life
Monday, November 25, 2013 @ 11:46 AM
SCIENTISTS in Aragón are hoping to clone a breed of mountain goat which is currently extinct using frozen cells from the last-known survivor of the species.
Named Celia, the only bucardo or Pyrénéen Ibex thought to be left, passed away 13 years ago after being crushed by a falling tree in the Ordesa National Park in the province of Huesca.
Fortunately for the future of her race, experts had taken cells from her the year before and frozen them in liquid nitrogen.
In 2003 – three years after the bucardo became officially extinct – they successfully cloned a kid after just seven of 57 nanny goats of a similar species who were artificially-inseminated became pregnant, with only one carrying the baby to full term.
But the offspring only survived for a few minutes, since it had a defect in one lung.
No further attempts have been made, but scientists are now carrying out tests to see whether Celia's cells – currently stored in liquid nitrogen at -196ºC – are still fertile.
If this is the case, they will attempt to clone bucardo embryos and implant them in surrogate mothers, being other types of female mountain goat.
The main problem, if babies were born, would be that the embryos would all be female as they come from a female bucardo's DNA.
But further experiments in the pipeline include either crossing them with a species in the same family – possibly the Spanish Pyrénéen Goat or the Gredos Pyrénéen Goat – the Capra Pyrenaica Hispanica or the Capra Pyrenaica Victoriae – two types of Ibex, or changing the gender of the DNA.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com