Extinct Ibex Resurrected By Cloning

The Telegraph is reporting that for the first time an extinct animal has been brought back via cloning. The Pyrenean ibex, a type of mountain goat, was declared officially extinct in 2000, but thanks to preserved skin samples scientists were able to insert that DNA into eggs from domestic goats to clone a female Pyrenean ibex. While the goat didn't survive long due to lung defects this gives scientists hopes that it will be possible to resurrect extinct species from frozen tissue. "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. Just seven of the embryos resulted in pregnancies and only one of the goats finally gave birth to a female bucardo, which died seven minutes later due to breathing difficulties, perhaps due to flaws in the DNA used to create the clone."

Comments

Not exactly.

[LWATCDR]

The mitochondrial DNA will not be from the IBX so what you have is still an hybrid.
Maybe better than nothing but not really bringing the species back.

Re:Not exactly.

[reverseengineer]

The ability to transfer mitochondria is definitely possible, and has been for over a decade- see here for instance, where it was performed between two species of mice. I doubt they bothered with the process though, for several reasons. Mitochondrial transfer has an admittedly low success rate, and of course nuclear transfer has a low success rate, so that to produce a viable clone with both procedures would be extremely difficult. The mtDNA also has a higher mutation rate than nuclear DNA due to the reactive oxygen species the mitochondrion cranks out. It might be that there isn't much meaningful interspecies variation between the mtDNA of extinct ibex and the living egg donor, especially in relation to intraspecies variation.

Also, the mitochondrial DNA in most mammals is about 17,000 base pairs. The average mammalian nuclear genome is a few billion base pairs. The nuclear DNA represents over 99.99% of the total DNA, and given that I'd assume domestic goat mtDNA to have at the very least a 98% concurrence with Pyrenean ibex mtDNA, you'd be looking at a variability consistent with the overall error rate of DNA. The preservation, cloning, and IVF steps likely swamp interspecies mtDNA variation as an overall source of genetic error.

Not necessarily

[HangingChad]

...which died a seven minutes later due to breathing difficulties, perhaps due to flaws in the DNA used to create the clone.

I have a goat herd and trust me when I say there doesn't have to be any flaws in the DNA to lose a baby. I've seen them still born, born too frail to stand up and get colostrum from mom, seen them live for a couple days and then die for no apparent reason. There's a reason goats have babies two and sometimes three at a time. The loss rate can be high, even under ideal conditions. The breed difference could account for it. Maybe the original breed had a slightly longer gestation period than modern goats.

Back in the day I used to help a vet implant zebra embryos in horses. The take rate was a bit higher than that experiment, but we had more embryos to work with. 10% was a pretty good rate for implants and there's a lot of data on horses.