“The northern white rhino sperm, when they were thawed out, were not very good and had to be activated by an electrical stimulus,” says Professor Renfree. Understandably, given the lack of living subjects, the northern white rhino sperm were not the highest quality. Step three is the in vitro fertilisation of the egg with the sperm. The next step in the process was bringing the eggs to maturity, which was done under laboratory conditions, in much the same way as the eggs of many other species, including humans. Are redheads with blue eyes really going extinct? Professor Hildebrandt and his team were able to collect viable eggs from both southern and from the remaining two female northern white rhinos. It is also resident in several zoos around the world. The southern white rhinoceros is a subspecies of the white rhino and its population is currently rated as ‘near threatened’ by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, with about 21,000 individuals remaining. The device developed by Professor Hildebrandt, who is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Melbourne and lead author of the paper, is currently awaiting patent approval and could also be used to collect eggs from other large mammals. “They showed that oocytes can be repeatedly recovered from live females by this trans-rectal ovum pick-up, matured, fertilised by intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) and, for the first time, developed to the blastocyst stage in vitro.” Professer Hildebrandt, right front, and his team extracting eggs from a southern white rhino using a newly developed ovum pick-up device.
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Professor Hildebrandt developed a 150 centimetre-long OPU device to guide the needle to the correct place using a trans-rectal route.” “Rhinos are very large (2,000 kg on average), so they have a reproductive tract that is very hard to access. This has never been done before with such a large animal,” Professor Renfree says. “He designed an ovum pick-up (OPU) device. Professor Renfree says the key to the project was new technology developed by Professor Thomas Hildebrandt, who’s based at the Leibniz-Institut in Berlin, that for the first time allowed collection of eggs from the ovaries of rhinoceroses. It was the eggs that were more difficult to collect. Samples were also taken from Sudan after his death and frozen,” says Professor Renfree. “Over the past few years, the sperm from three bulls was sampled and put in cryopreservation. Secrets from beyond extinction: The Tasmanian tigerīased on the lack of males, sperm would seem to be a major stumbling block, but forward-thinking researchers had already collected and stored sperm from four northern white rhinos. There are five steps needed to get to the stage where we see a live birth of a hybrid northern-southern white rhino, and Professor Marilyn Renfree, from the School of BioSciences at the University of Melbourne, who was part of the team that developed the embryos, says the first step - harvesting eggs and sperm - was one of the most challenging. Science has stepped in with a possible lifeline for the northern white rhino (NWR) and other critically endangered large mammals, according to new research published in Nature Communications.Īn international team of researchers using assisted reproductive technologies (ART) has combined eggs from the southern white rhino (SWR) with the cryopreserved sperm of a northern white rhino to create viable embryos and embryonic stem cells. Fatu is one of two remaining northern white rhinos, both female, who live on a nature reserve in Kenya.
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The two remaining female northern white rhinos, who are infertile, were doomed to live out their lives as the last of their kind.Įxcept maybe they won’t be the last. When Sudan, the last surviving male northern white rhino in the world, died in Kenya in March 2018, the species was as good as extinct.