Endangered white rhinos’ cells turned into sperm and egg stem cells

Researchers hope producing embryos from grownup cells within the lab may supply a strategy to save the northern white rhino, with solely two females remaining

By Carissa Wong

Cells with the potential to kind sperm and eggs have been derived from northern white rhino pores and skin cells, elevating hopes that lab-grown embryos may save the animals from extinction.

The solely two remaining northern white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) are females – Najin and her daughter Fatu on the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, a reserve in Kenya. The final male northern white rhino, referred to as Sudan, died in March 2018.

The following 12 months, researchers tried to avoid wasting this subspecies through the use of sperm from deceased male northern white rhinos, together with Sudan, to fertilise egg cells collected from Najin and Fatu.

This has thus far produced 22 northern white rhino embryos which were frozen for future implantation in southern white rhinos (C. simum simum), a intently associated subspecies of which about 20,000 stay in southern Africa.

Another potential strategy to produce embryos can be to show pores and skin cells from southern white rhinos into stem cells, which have the power to show into varied kinds of specialist cell. These may then be coaxed to kind egg and sperm cells – an strategy that has labored in mice.

To take a look at this methodology for northern white rhinos, Katsuhiko Hayashi at Osaka University in Japan and his colleagues first bathed pores and skin cells from a feminine northern white rhino who died in 2015, referred to as Nabire, in a cocktail of chemical compounds that turned them into stem cells with the potential to kind any kind of cell.

The workforce then examined totally different mixtures of progress elements and chemical compounds to make such stem cells from southern white rhinos flip into the precursors of sperm and egg cells, referred to as primordial germ cell-like cells. Once they discovered the exact cocktail that efficiently did this in southern white rhinos, they utilized it to the northern white rhino stem cells and located it labored for them too.

“This was a lot of hard work, and it will be very beneficial to the field,” says Jeanne Loring on the Scripps Research Institute in California. But additional work is required to see if such egg and sperm cells lead to fertilised embryos, she says.

Even then, it’s unclear whether or not southern white rhino surrogates would efficiently carry the embryos to supply northern white rhino offspring, says Loring.

“There is the additional challenge of acquiring the genetic diversity that is necessary to sustain a population. Inbreeding invariably has bad consequences,” she provides.

Journal reference: Science Advances, , DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abp9683

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