Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogel bomb here. It might not surprise you to hear that many wild animal populations are struggling. At this point. Humans and the livestock that we grow for food account for of mammal biomass on Earth. We take up a lot of space with our bodies, livestock, and infrastructure, and that's driving wild animals into extinction. But
we twenty one century humans are smart, right. Can't we figure out a way to help these animals survive or at least save some of their genetic material until such a time when we can help make, for example, new Sumatran tigers, of which there are only about four hundred alive today in the wild. The concept of creating a repository for the genetic material of endangered species has been
around for a while. Projects like the Frozen Zoo at the San Diego Zoo and the Frozen Arc in the UK have been cryogenically storing genetic material from captive mammals, that is, raising it in liquid nitrogen at temperatures around negative three degrees fahrenheit that's negative one celsius. Samples from everything from the Pacific pocket mouse to the clouded leopard have been stored since the nighties, and cloning endangered species
has proven possible. In the early two thousands, scientists successfully cloned a couple of them, an African wildcat and an Asian ox. But we spoke with Franklin West, an assistant professor in the Regenerative Bioscience Center at the University of Georgia. He said, the problem with cloning is it's highly inefficient. The process is tricky even with animals that are well
understood and described, like housecats, dogs, horses, and cows. So when you start talking about cloning endangered animal species, it gets tough because we just don't have enough information about the animal. Cloning also requires eggs from the animal you're trying to clone, but obtaining gammeats, that is, sperm and eggs from a live animal can be extremely difficult, especially
an endangered one. Sperm can be taken from a zoo animal that has reads sly died, but eggs present the real challenge, especially because as in human IVF treatments, the best results often come from having lots of eggs available. West said, most of the time it's too risky to collect eggs because you need to superovulate the animal, and sometimes there's a surgical procedure involved. With most endangered species,
the best you can get is a skin biopsy. But skin is never going to turn into a new tiger, so what do you do with that. It's almost of limited value without some sort of functionalization of it, which is why West and his colleagues have developed the technology to turn almost any cell in the body there are some exceptions, but very few, into a pluripotent stem cell, which is a cell that can turn into any other
type of cell in the body. West and his colleagues have had success in turning a skin cell into a stem cell and turning those stem cells into sperm. West says they could potentially even turn a stem cell into an egg as well, which would get around to the problem with cloning not having an egg source. If they can use this assisted reproductive technology to make both of these male and female gammeats, they could use them together
to make a live offspring. The team has begun by banking skin cells from a Sumatran tiger and a clouded leopard at Zoo Atlanta. West explained we could have done cows or horses but we chose cats for a number of reasons. The fact that we know a lot about domestic housecat reproductive physiology makes it reasonable to do larger cats like clouded leopards. Ultimately, what I'd like to do is use domesticated cats as recipient animals. Theoretically, you could
transfer clouded leopard embryo into a housecat. In addition to creating new animals, this technology might be useful in helping protect vulnerable populations of animals from disease. For instance, the lions in the Serengetti National Park have become vulnerable to canine distemper, a disease related to measles and humans, which is most commonly found in domesticated dogs. This technology could
potentially be used to generate distemper resistant lions. Because it's almost impossible to vaccinate in the injured animals in mass this might be an option to breed resistant animals that could introduce resistance into natural populations. Today's episode was written by Jesselyn Shields and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more in this and lots of other futuristic topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com. And
for more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.