A research group at Osaka University and others has announced that it has succeeded for the first time in the world in producing cells that will become the source of eggs and sperm from iPS cells of rhinoceros, of which there are only two in the world.
The group hopes to develop technology to create new offspring and lead to the preservation of species.
The Northern White Rhinoceros, which lives in Africa, is extinct in the wild and survives only in captivity, leaving only two female parents and children in Kenya's nature reserves.
A group at Osaka University and others studied conditions suitable for culturing rhinoceros, in order to apply the technology to generate egg and sperm cells from mouse iPS cells.
Using a different type of rhinoceros cell that is easy to obtain, we repeated the experiment by changing the type of substance and time to be put in when culturing, and found that shortening the culture time resulted in cells that are the source of eggs and sperm. I discovered that you can
Using this method, the group was the first in the world to succeed in producing the cells that would become the source of eggs from northern white rhinoceros iPS cells.
Since the sperm of northern white rhinoceros is cryopreserved in a nature reserve in Kenya, the group plans to produce eggs themselves from the cells produced this time and fertilize them in vitro with sperm.
Masafumi Hayashi, a specially appointed researcher at the Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka University, said, "I would like to develop technology to create new offspring and aim to apply it to other animals."