The first giant panda conceived through artificial insemination with frozen sperm was born in China's Sichuan province, a breakthrough for breeding the endangered species, researchers said on Friday.
Eleven-year-old You You gave birth yesterday to a baby giant panda that appeared healthy at the Ya'an base, said Huang Yan, a researcher with the 'China Giant Panda Protection and Research Center' of the Wolong nature reserve.
The researcher claimed that it was the first artificial fertilization using frozen panda sperm at southwest Sichuan province. "It can avoid inbreeding of giant pandas and increase the diversity of the species," he was quoted as saying by the state-run Xinhua news agency. It is You You's third baby, and the 10th panda cub born at Wolong this year.
Artificial insemination is commonly used for breeding pandas, which have a very low sex drive. Huang said with the technology, "we can keep the sperm frozen for decades". "The freezing and thawing causes no harm or change to the genetic structure of the sperm, so the technology has no influence on the baby," he underlined.
The pandas were moved from Wolong to the Bifengxia breeding base in Ya'an City after the earthquake in May 12 last year. A total of 88 pandas are living in Ya'an while another 56 are outside Sichuan Province. A new breeding center is being built to replace the former quake-damaged habitat.
In 2006, 34 pandas were born through artificial insemination in China and 30 survived - both record numbers for the endangered species. However, using panda sperm that has been frozen earlier - instead of from an immediate donor - had not been successful before.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
World's first giant Panda born from frozen sperm: Report
Eleven-year-old You You gave birth yesterday to a baby giant panda that appeared healthy at the Ya'an base, said Huang Yan, a researcher with the 'China Giant Panda Protection and Research Center' of the Wolong nature reserve.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Dead tigers to be Frozen, studied
Thirty tigers have died in the country’s various sanctuaries and reserves this year. With many of the deaths being suspect, the state has decided to take some action.
In a bid to fix accountability and check the practice of showing unnatural tiger deaths as natural, the National Tiger Conservation Authority has decided that each dead tiger will be deep-frozen, stored and studied by an independent team to get to the bottom of how it died.
A team, formed for this, which will comprise an official from the Authority, a state veterinary doctor and a non-governmental tiger expert nominated by the chief wildlife warden of the state. They will treat injured tigers too.
An advisory issued by the Authority — a statutory body under the Ministry of Environment and Forests — is aimed at bringing about transparency in the way tiger mortality is dealt with in the country.
Since November, at least five tigers have died in the Kaziranga National Park in Assam, over six have died in Kanha National Park in Madhya Pradesh and two deaths have been reported from Pilibhit Tiger Reserve in MP.
While it was claimed that the Kaziranga deaths were a result of combat between tigers, an investigation found poisoning caused some deaths.
“A number of reports we received stated tigers died as a result of mutual combat. While tigers can die in combat among each other, it is unusual that so many would have died due to that,” said Authority member-secretary Rajesh Gopal.
The Authority will provide central funding for deep freeze and generator facilities. It will be in charge of conducting post-mortems on the carcasses of the deceased tigers.
Gopal added, “If the committee members are unable to get to the site within two or three hours of the tiger’s death, we have decided to allot funds for deep freeze facility large enough to hold a tiger.” This way, the carcass can be preserved until the exact reason of its death can be ascertained.
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Sunday, May 31, 2009
Japanese scientists create transgenic Monkeys
The exploit opens up exciting prospects for medical researchers, they said.
It could eventually lead to lab monkeys that replicate some of humanity’s most devastating diseases, providing a new model for exploring how these disorders are caused and how they may be cured.
‘Great advances in pre-clinical research can be expected using these models,’ the team said.
But other voices warned of a potential ethics storm, brewed by fears that technology used on our closest animal relatives could be turned to create genetically-engineered humans.
In a study published in the British journal Nature, a team led by Erika Sasaki of the Central Institute for Experimental Animals at Keio University reported on experiments on common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus), a small monkey native to Brazil.
They introduced a foreign gene, tucked inside a virus, into marmoset embryos that were then nurtured in a bath of sucrose.
The gene codes for green fluorescent protein (GFP), a substance that was originally isolated from a jellyfish and is now commonly used as a biotech marker. An animal tagged with GFP glows green when exposed to ultraviolet light, proving that a key gene sequence has been switched on.
The transgenic embryos were then implanted in the uterus of seven surrogate mother marmosets.
Three of recipients miscarried. The other four gave birth to five offspring, all of which carried the GFP gene.
In two of these five, the GFP gene had been incorporated into the reproductive cells. A second generation of marmosets was then derived from one of the two.
The work is important, because medical researchers have hankered for an animal model that is closer to the human anatomy than rodents.
Mice and rats, genetically engineered to have the symptoms of certain human diseases, are the mainstay of pre-clinical lab work, in which scientists test their theories before trying out any outcome on human volunteers.
But many disorders, especially neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, are so complex that they cannot be reproduced meaningfully in rodents because their biology is different.
Hopes for a non-human primate model have until now been dashed by the failure to insert a gene into a monkey’s sperm and eggs — the ‘germline’ that ensures that the inserted DNA is passed on to future generations rather than lost.
The first genetically-modified monkey was born in 2000. Known as ANDi (the initials of ‘Inserted DNA’ spelt backwards), the rhesus carried the GFP gene but not in its reproductive cells.
The latest exploit thus opens up hopes of eventually breeding colonies of transgenic primates with inherited traits that closely replicate human disease.
‘This is the first case ever established in the world that an introduced gene was successfully inherited (by) the next generation in primates,’ the researchers said in a press release.
Future plans include creating transgenic marmosets that replicate human diseases such as Parkinson’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
In a commentary also published by Nature, Gerald Schatten and Shoukhrat Mitalipov, primate research specialists in the US, praised the achievement as ‘undoubtedly a milestone’, but sounded caution.
They said marmosets were not as useful as baboons or rhesus monkeys in replicating some diseases, notably HIV and tuberculosis.
Another question was the random insertion of a foreign gene in the monkey’s genetic code. This may have caused some of the miscarriages and, if previous research is a guide, could unleash cancer.
Scientists also have to address legitimate public concern about animal welfare and the need for ‘realistic policies’ to prevent genetically-engineered babies, they warned. ‘There are many unanswered questions,’ Helen Wallace, of GeneWatch UK, a British NGO that monitors the ethics of gene research, said.
‘It’s a big step from making a fluorescent green marmoset to making a marmoset that replicates a human disease, it’s a much more complicated thing to do.
‘There’s also a very important ethical debate, firstly about the animals themselves and secondly about what this might lead to in the future, whether it might be ethically justified to genetically engineer humans Klik disini untuk melanjutkan »»
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Green-glowing Monkeys have green-glowing babies
Japanese researchers have genetically engineered monkeys whose hair roots, skin and blood glow green under a special light, and who have passed on their traits to their offspring, the first time this has been achieved in a primate.
They spliced a jellyfish gene into common marmosets, and said on Wednesday they hope to use their colony of glowing animals to study human Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS.
Erika Sasaki and Hideyuki Okano of the Keio University School of Medicine in Japan used a virus to carry the gene for green fluorescent protein into monkey embryos, which were implanted into a female monkey, and four out of five were born with the gene throughout their bodies.
One fathered a healthy baby that also carried the new genes, they reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
"The birth of this transgenic marmoset baby is undoubtedly a milestone," stem cell expert Dr. Gerald Schatten, of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and Shoukhrat Mitalipov, of Oregon Health and Sciences University, wrote in a commentary in Nature.
"Transgenic marmosets are potentially useful models for research into infectious diseases, immunology and neurological disorders, for example," they wrote.
"I am most interested in Parkinson's disease and ALS," Okano told reporters in a telephone briefing. Both are incurable nerve diseases. But Okano said animals could be created to study a range of diseases.
The researchers used marmosets because they reproduce quickly, reaching sexual maturity in about a year.
"At the moment we use mice with mutant genes that are associated with Parkinson's to search for new drugs to treat the condition," Dr. Kieran Breen, director of Research and Development at Britain's Parkinson's Disease Society, said in a statement.
"Because non-human primates are much closer to humans than mice genetically, the successful creation of transgenic marmosets means that we will have a new animal model to work with."
Last year, the discoverers of the green fluorescent protein won the Nobel Prize in chemistry -- Japanese-born Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Martin Chalfie of Columbia University in New York and Roger Tsien of the University of California, San Diego.
The protein glows under blue and ultraviolet light, allowing researchers to illuminate tumor cells, trace toxins and to monitor genes as they turn on and off.
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Saturday, May 23, 2009
Introducing The Fuel-Efficient Cow
As new fuel efficiency standards for cars make news in the United States, scientists in Canada are already developing more fuel-efficient, and more polite, cattle.
The research promises to lower costs to farmers by reducing the amount of feed needed for raising cattle. It could also help the environment by reducing the number of methane released into the atmosphere, where it is a climate-warming greenhouse gas.
"Ruminants produce a lot of methane; three cows equal one [mid-sized] car" in terms of global warming potential, said John Basarab, an agricultural research scientist for the Alberta government.
"In Alberta alone there are more than six million cows, and in the U.S., there are over 100 million," he said. That's a lot of methane.
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Sunday, April 19, 2009
Composted cane toads to feed Sugar cane
Cane toads will be turned into compost for sugar cane farmers by a Queensland waste management company.
The company is asking Cairns residents to capture the pests and bring them to its 'toad day out' this weekend.
Plant manager Haydn Slattery says the company is hoping to collect about 100 kilograms of toads, which will be humanely killed in preparation to be used as the raw materials for compost.
"Over a three-day period we'll take the material into the plant, it'll break down microbially into compost, and in four weeks time after that, it'll end up in cane farms," he said.
"Finally after 80-odd years of cane toads being around after being introduced as something that's going to be of use to cane farmers, 80 years down the track they're being turned into compost and finally becoming a benefit to our farmers."
Cane toads were introduced into north Queensland in 1935 to control pest beetles, and quickly spread along vast tracts of Queensland coastline.
The cane toads did little to control the beetles, and have become a widespread pest themselves in Queensland, northern New South Wales the Northern Territory and small parts of Western Australia.
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Thirsty Camels 'turning the taps on' in central Australia
Labels: Animals, Australia, Community-And-Society, Environment, Environmental-Management, Goverment-And-Politics, Human-Interest, Local-Goverment, Offbeat, Regional
Camels are coming into communities in central Australia and turning on the taps, the Macdonnell Shire Council says.
The shire has applied to the Federal Government for a $4.5 million slice of infrastructure funding to build camel-proof boundaries around 14 communities.
Wayne Wright from the shire says thirsty camels are causing significant damage.
"In a number of our communities it's quite common for camels to enter the community and if there are any taps adjacent to houses they're quite capable of either turning the taps on or knocking the taps off so they get water."
The intention is to put cattle grids at the entrances of the communities and place fencing around them.
The fencing would also protect the communities from other feral animals, such as donkeys and horses.
Mr Wright says the animals rip up plants and thwart efforts to improve the aesthetics of the communities.
"The big issue for us is should we try to do any beautification works in our communities - tree planting, grassing of areas.
"Unless we can limit the access to those areas, we are going to be wasting our money."
The shire is expecting to find out if the application has been successful next month.
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Cat found alive after 5 weeks under Rubble
Labels: Animals, Germany, Human-Interest, Offbeat
A cat named Felix was found alive and well beneath the rubble of a six-storey building in Cologne that collapsed five weeks ago, the fire brigade in the German city said.
The 12-year-old cat was in surprisingly good health, authorities said.
He was found beneath the city archives building that collapsed on March 3.
Rescue workers were clearing away the rubble from the ruins, in which two people were killed, when they spotted a pair of small paws.
"The men lifted some concrete blocks when suddenly a little cat came to light," said fire brigade spokesman Dietmar Paust.
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