A ground-breaking achievement by Chinese gene scientists has led to the first-ever successful cloning of an arctic wolf.
Recently born in China, the arctic wolf (Canis lupus arctos), was carried to term by an unlikely surrogate mother, a beagle.
According to LiveScience, the wolf pup, named Maya, and her beagle mother were introduced to the world via video conference on 19 September 2022. The feat was achieved by scientists from the Sinogene Biotechnology Company in Beijing, China. The video was released exactly 100 days after Maya was born on June 10, 2022.
Sinogene which specialises in cloning deceased pets such as cats, dogs and horses for private clients, now wants to use its expertise to help clone endangered species for conservation purposes, China’s Global Times reported.
Maya was cloned using DNA collected from a fully grown Arctic wolf, also named Maya that died in captivity at Harbin Polarland, a wildlife park in northeast China. The original Maya, who was born in Canada before being shipped to China in 2006, died due to old age in early 2021, according to the Global Times.
The cloning of Maya was successfully completed "after two years of painstaking efforts," Mi Jidong, general manager of Sinogene, said at the company's press conference.
Sinogene researchers created 137 Arctic wolf embryos by fusing skin cells from the original Maya with immature egg cells from dogs, using a process known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). Of those embryos, 85 were successfully transplanted into seven beagle surrogates. From those transplanted embryos, just one fully developed during pregnancy.
The researchers told local media that beagle surrogates were used because there were not enough female wolves in captivity for the scientists' experiments. Dogs and wolves share remarkably similar DNA which allowed the hybrid pregnancy to gestate successfully.
Maya now lives with her surrogate mother at a Sinogene lab in Xuzhou, eastern China, but the wolf pup will eventually be transferred to Harbin Polarland to live with other Arctic wolves.
According to CBS News, Sinogene was also involved with a project in 2019 which produced six identical German shepherd clones, which were then inducted into the Beijing police force.
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