Press Trust of India
Washington, Dec 10: Scientists in the US have created the world’s first litter of puppies conceived in a test tube, a breakthrough they say could help eradicate heritable diseases in dogs and humans. The advance through in vitro fertilisation (IVF) opens the door for conserving endangered canid species, using gene-editing technologies to eradicate heritable diseases in dogs and for study of genetic diseases. Canines share more than 350 similar heritable disorders and traits with humans, almost twice the number as any other species.
Nineteen embryos were transferred to the host female dog, who gave birth to seven healthy puppies, two from a beagle mother and a cocker spaniel father, and five from two pairings of beagle fathers and mothers. “Since the mid-1970s, people have been trying to do this in a dog and have been unsuccessful,” said Alex Travis, associate professor in Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. For successful in vitro fertilisation, researchers must fertilise a mature egg with a sperm in a lab to produce an embryo. They must then insert the embryo into a host female at the right time in her reproductive cycle.
The first challenge was to collect mature eggs from the female oviduct. The researchers first tried to use eggs that were in the same stage of cell maturation as other animals, but since dogs’ reproductive cycles differ from other mammals, those eggs failed to fertilise.
