Endangered Animals and their DNA

[Punum]

What do you think about cloning the DNA from an endangered animal to keep it from going extinct? Dr. Betsy Dresser, senior vice president of research for the Audubon Nature Institute in New Orleans, is doing just that. She takes the DNA from an endangered animal and uses it with a non-endangered relative. An example is the typical house cat and the African Wildcat.
She takes the egg of the house cat and sucks out the DNA. She then takes DNA from the skin cells of the African Wildcat and places it inside the egg. She uses electrodes to spit the eggs. If everything goes well she places the egg inside the house cat so it can mature and product a new kitten. It has been going so well, the cloned cats are mating and giving birth to very healthy kittens on their own.

This procedure might sound easy but it’s not. There is a lot of scientific research that goes into this. Take the Woolly Mammoth. They don’t know the gestation period for an animal like that so they would have guess. The goal is to keep endangered species from going extinct, not to bring back the Woolly Mammoth. She would like to do work on the Lynx to keep it from going extinct, or the bongo, cousin to the antelope.
The Audubon Nature Institute is located on 1,200 acres of land. It seems part Serengeti, part high-tech medical facility. She knows there is a lot of controversy on this topic. Her opinion, she doesn’t want our next generation of kids to only know an elephant from a text book. She wants the kids to be able to see these animals alive, in their own environment. If she doesn’t do this now, then we will be losing a lot of animals for future generations.

She is known as the lady with the “frozen zoo”. She collects tiny skin samples from thousands of different animals, representing hundreds of species, and is storing them at 343 degrees below zero in tiny canisters inside tanks filled with liquid nitrogen. She has samples from tigers, bears, frogs, rhinos and many more animals. She feels there is no reason not to save DNA from every species since the cells can survive for hundreds, if not thousands of years in these tanks.

The Woolly Mammoth is her poster animal because the thought of it is inspiring. Imagine the face of a 9 year old child. This child sees a picture of the Woolly Mammoth and knows that there might be the possibility of brining that animal back to life. Talk about inspiring for a kid to want to get involved in science that way. If not, there is the message to do something to improve our environment NOW so we are not impacting and affecting animals is such a negative way. We all live on the same planet and are connected to each other.

No one has yet found the intact cell it would take to resurrect that Woolly Mammoth, but in Siberia, two years ago, a reindeer herder discovered a remarkably well-preserved one month old baby mammoth that had lain frozen in permafrost for 40,000 years.

Its DNA was in better shape than any previously found, raising hopes that between new finds and new technology, it may just be a matter of time.

You can see more: Animal Connection