“World’s 1st Cloned Wild Arctic Wolf Makes Debut, Pioneering Conservation of Endangered Wildlife through Cloning Tech”, 2022-09-19 ():
A Beijing-based gene firm Sinogene on Monday announced the debut of the world’s first cloned wild Arctic wolf via video, 100 days after its birth in a Beijing lab. Experts said its birth pioneers the breeding of more rare and endangered animals through cloning technology.
“To save the endangered animal, we started the research cooperation with Harbin Polarland on cloning the arctic wolf in 2020. After two years of painstaking efforts, the arctic wolf was cloned successfully. It is the first case of its kind in the world”, Mi Jidong, the company’s general manager of the Beijing-based Sinogene Biotechnology Co, said at a press conference in Beijing.
…Born on June 10, the wolf, named Maya, is in very good health, as the video showed. Its donor cell came from the skin sample of a wild female arctic wolf, which had been introduced from Canada to Harbin Polarland. Its oocyte was from a female dog and its surrogate mother was a beagle, according to Zhao Jianping, the company’s deputy general manager. The cloning of the arctic wolf was accomplished by constructing 137 new embryos from enucleated oocytes and somatic cells, followed by the transfer of 85 embryos to the uteri of 7 beagles, of which one was born as a healthy wolf—Maya, Zhao noted.
…The cloned wolf now lives with her surrogate beagle in a lab of Sinogene in Xuzhou, East China’s Jiangsu Province, and later she will be delivered to the Harbin Polarland, Northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province and displayed to the public…The Global Times learned from Zhao that another male cloned arctic wolf is expected to be delivered on Thursday.