This wolf has a canine mother! Why is the world's first cloned Arctic wolf attracting so much attention?

The world's first cloned Arctic wolf, born in Beijing, celebrated its 100th day. This is a practice of using cloning technology to protect rare species. Why was the mother of the Arctic wolf a beagle?

Written by reporter Zhao Tianyu

▲Rolling around and gnawing on bones, what does the world's first cloned Arctic wolf look like?

On September 19, a press conference on the world's first cloned Arctic wolf was held at the Beijing Wildlife Park. Reporters learned from the press conference that on June 10 this year, the world's first cloned Arctic wolf was born in Beijing by a beagle surrogate mother and is currently in good health. In addition, the second cloned Arctic wolf (male) will also be born soon.

The successful birth of the cloned wolf means that the technology of cloning Arctic wolves using the cloning dog platform has strong practical application value. It is also an extremely important practice of commercial cloning technology in saving endangered animals and protecting biodiversity.

Beagle gives birth to Arctic wolf

The Arctic wolf, also known as the white wolf, is a subspecies of the gray wolf in the Canidae family, distributed in northern Eurasia, northern Canada, and northern Greenland. It is one of the world's endangered species and is listed in the 2012 Red List of Endangered Species of the World Conservation Union (IUCN).

Dai Rui, general manager of Harbin Polar Park, introduced that the mother of the cloned Arctic wolf came from the wild Arctic wolf "Maya" introduced to the Polar Park 15 years ago. "Although the park has successfully carried out artificial breeding of Arctic wolves before, Maya, who has entered the elderly stage, has not been able to reproduce under the intervention of assisted reproductive technology. Cloning technology has become a new hope for continuing the reproduction of species."

In 2020, Harbin Polar Park signed a cooperation agreement with Beijing Sinogene Biotech Co., Ltd., the latter is the first commercial pet cloning company in China with completely independent intellectual property rights. It successfully cloned pet dogs and cats in 2018 and 2019, and established a commercial technology platform for canine cloning.

▲Pictures of wild Arctic wolves

Why choose the canine technology platform to clone the Arctic wolf? This is because dogs and wolves both have 39 pairs of chromosomes, and their genes are very similar, without reproductive isolation, which creates many convenient conditions for cloning. But on the other hand, after millions of years of evolution, wolves and dogs have formed considerable differences in living habits and body appearance, so it is not easy to clone wolves using dog cloning technology.

"We remove the cumulus and enucleate the oocytes, and then inject the donor cells into the perivitelline space of the enucleated oocytes." Talking about the technical path of cloning wolves, Zhao Jianping, vice president and technical director of Sino Valley, introduced that the somatic cell nucleus and the enucleated oocyte are reconstructed into a new embryo, and the activated cloned embryo is transplanted into the uterus of a beagle to make it pregnant.

Compared with other dog breeds, beagles have low pain sensitivity, higher obedience, and a suitable body shape, making them the best choice for experimental dogs and surrogate dogs. After two years of research and breakthrough, on June 10, 2022, a beagle gave birth to a healthy Arctic wolf cub, and the world's first cloned Arctic wolf was officially born in Beijing.

Some endangered animals are included in the research scope

The 2020 Life on Planet Report released by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) shows that the number of more than 4,392 monitored species of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians has declined between 1970 and 2016. Latin America and the Caribbean are the worst affected regions in the world, with an average decline of 94% in wildlife populations.

In the past, methods such as establishing nature reserves, carrying out domestication and breeding, and implementing reintroduction projects have all proven to be effective. Today, with the development of genetic technology, cloning technology has provided a new possibility for saving endangered species. It provides a good entry point for the protection of endangered wildlife and has made important contributions to the protection of biodiversity and the recovery of endangered species.

▲The world's first somatic cell cloning of an Arctic wolf. (Photo source: Beijing Sino Valley)

As a cutting-edge breeding method, animal cloning technology is applied in different fields and plays a significant role in pet cloning, working dog cloning, cloning of large animals in animal husbandry (cattle, pigs, horses, etc.), cloning of heterospecies animals, and protection of endangered animals. At the same time, through technologies such as gene editing, animals can become better in some aspects.

For example, Spanish scientists successfully cloned the extinct Bucardo wild goat in 2003; in February 2021, American scientists successfully cloned the endangered black-footed ferret using frozen cells from a long-dead wild animal; scientists from many countries have also been trying to clone mammoths and revive this "giant creature" from the Ice Age.

▲Press conference site

Zhao Jianping revealed that based on the cloning of dogs and cats, the company hopes to use the accumulated biotechnology and gene editing technology to carry out more cloning and species protection research on endangered species. At present, some endangered animals have entered the scope of experimental demonstration by the company's technical team. "Snow leopards, clouded leopards, golden cats, etc. are all national first-class protected animals with scarce populations. If cloning technology, especially heterospecies cloning technology, can be used well, it will be very beneficial to the protection of endangered animals."

The company has also signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Beijing Wildlife Park to fully utilize the advantages of both parties' resources to carry out in-depth cooperation in the preservation of genetic seeds of China's rare and endangered wild animals, identification of individual wild animals, protection of wild animals, research on wild animal populations, application of cloning technology, and popular science lectures.

▲Press conference site (Source: Science and Technology Daily)

Ethical and technical challenges still need to be faced

"Cloning technology provides a good entry point for the protection of endangered wild animals, and it makes a great contribution to the protection of biodiversity." He Zhengming, director of the Institute of Laboratory Animal Resources of the China Food and Drug Inspection Institute and president of the Beijing Laboratory Animal Society, said that cloning technology has been around for many years and has a wide range of applications. The birth of the world's first cloned Arctic wolf is a milestone event.

Lai Liangxue, a researcher at the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also believes that unlike natural reproduction, cloning technology is an effective way to protect genetic diversity and increase population size, especially for animals with small populations and difficult reproductive cell extraction.

But another notable fact is that although cloning technology has been conquered and mastered by many biological scientists, different species have their own reproductive physiological characteristics. Animal cloning, especially the cloning of endangered wild animals, still needs to face many ethical and technical challenges.

▲In 1997, scientists cloned Dolly the sheep. Since then, many scientists have begun to devote themselves to the field of cloning technology.

From a technical perspective, one of the main difficulties in cloning animals is how to obtain mature oocytes and reconstruct embryos. Taking cloned dogs and cloned cats as an example, dogs have a special reproductive physiological structure that is not regulated by hormones, so it is difficult to accurately determine the maturation time of oocytes and obtain oocytes. The cell apoptosis rate of cats is relatively fast, and skin tissue that has been dead for more than 3 days basically loses its meaning of extraction.

The success rate is also a major problem in cloning technology. Every slight mistake in the operation may lead to the failure of the experiment. For example, the cloned sheep Dolly was successfully born after more than 200 experiments. my country's giant panda cloning has not made any progress due to the low success rate.

Ethical issues are also a focus of debate in animal cloning. Although not as big as human cloning, there are still some issues, such as whether the cloning process will cause harm to animals? Will the cloned animals cause biodiversity and environmental problems when used? There are also animal welfare issues of cloned animals themselves, etc.

He Zhengming said that there is still a big difference between experimental animals and wild animals. How to make cloned animals adapt to the wild environment is worth thinking about. Improving the breeding capacity of cloned animals is also one of the focuses of future scientific research. But he also pointed out that "commercial companies participate in the protection of endangered wildlife and clone species such as Arctic wolves. This itself shows that companies have a huge role in promoting scientific and technological innovation, which deserves recognition and praise."

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Produced by: Beijing Science and Technology News | Beijing Science and Technology Media

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