Slashdot Mirror
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."
We can just patch the damaged or missing segments with frog DNA...
Nature will find a way.
Did we learn nothing from Jurassic Park?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I won't goat you, I herd it's dead Jim.
Ewe!
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Pyrenean Ibex extinct... again.
So, this Ibex became the first species to become extinct twice?
I'm thinking Jurassic Pork. Bring back some extinct hog species and grill 'em up!
MRSH-Recording device, corned beef sandwich with kraut, seafaring bird, and the foamy top of a beverage.
Recognized by the goatee
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
1 dinosaur, please!
Steal my band's record! Seriously,
But they are off the menu...
I'll bet the good people at The Telegraph are wondering how a story published on 31 Jan 2009 made it back into the most viewed list.
no, no, no, no, no!
try this :
"This just in, Pyrenean Ibex still extinct." </Chevy Chase>
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
As mentioned before, this is not an exact clone. The only thing this story proves is that they can create a hybrid animal (nothing new there) and that the researches who did this were dishonest about the product (nothing new there) and that the news media is full of a bunch of dolts with little desire or propensity for actual journalism (nothing new there either). The only thing that was created was 7 minutes of suffering.
Mammoth fail. Tusk. Tusk. Tusk.
rewriting history since 2109
Yeah, but that's because they taste too much like spotted owl.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
What about the Spam, Spam, Spam, Bald Eagle and Spam?
rewriting history since 2109
Don't you see? It's a marketing ploy by Apple!
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
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.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Dinosaurs still exist. We call them "birds".
In particular, they're the decendents of the clade Maniraptora, which includes velociraptor. Many are still remarkably similar to their ancestors -- for example, compare these reconstructed skull images of oviraptors with modern birds (for example, the cassowary)
As it says in the Constitution, Lenin is in my shower.
Aye, actually when I read the heading I felt some kind of a déjà vu... no wonder.
It turns out that many clones are genetically identical, but not epigenetically identical. DNA methylation errors are common in nuclear transfer clones, and are thought to be responsible for at least some of the defects that often occur in clones. In particular, some imprinted genes important for normal growth and development may end up with two silenced copies instead of the expected one silent and one active, leading to effects from congenital organ defects to an increased risk of cancer. Curiously, some of the important developmental genes that can experience this situation in most mammals are not imprinted in primates. At least from a technical perspective, it might be easier to clone humans than goats.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
Goat gestation period are around 150 days.
Ibex is around 165 days.
Even if you take a healthy Ibex mother and remove the fetus after 150 days, it will have similar lung disability. Lungs being the last thing to develop in a fetus, if you chop off the last few days of fetal development, you're sacrificing lung function. They won't work at 100%, and they'll be way more sensitive to any agitation. It seems to me like a better approach would be to find an animal with a equal OR LONGER gestational period. I don't mean for Ibexes in particular; it just makes sense for any mammal. Try a mountain goat: 180 day average gestation period. Just make sure you bust the little guy out two weeks early.
If humans go extinct and you implant human DNA into a bonobo, you're putting something that takes 280 days to cook into an oven with a 230 day timer. No, it won't be fully cooked when the thing dings - the lungs especially. Premature human babies do survive that young, but we've had a long time and lots of money poured into finding ways to make that happen.
The common ancestor we share with the dinosaurs was not itself a dinosaur, but the birds started out as a branch of the dinosaurs. If you consider the word "dinosaur" to be a clade, then they are dinosaurs.
That is one Intrepid Ibex for sure. Maybe they spliced in some penguin DNA? *wink*