We all remember the moment when the last Sumatran rhino in Malaysia, Iman, died in November last year, bringing the now endangered species one step closer to extinction.
Now, Malaysian scientists are hoping to use tissues and cells from Iman, and other dead rhinos to bring the population back.
Photo via World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
A team from the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) plan to use stem cell technology and in-vitro fertilization to make this possible, as reported by CNN.
Dr. Muhammad Lokman Md Isa, one of the lead researchers said that the process which is similar to cloning hopes to see the birth of a new baby rhino using cells from old rhinos that have died.
“Before the three rhinos died (the last surviving rhinos in Malaysia), we got their cells and the cells are still alive, which is why I’m quite confident.”
“If you don’t have any cells or if we just had tissue that aren’t living anymore, we can’t do anything with that. We can only put it in a book or museum. But now we have a living thing that we can use,” he added.
So, here is how they’re going to do this.
Photo via The Jakarta Post
Scientists are going to take the cells that they extracted from the heart, lung, brain, kidney, and stem cells of the rhinos that have died and use them to generate a whole new one - and there are two possible approaches...
First, they could develop the stem cells themselves into an egg and sperm and create an embryo which will be planted into a surrogate rhino
Or the second option is to take the egg of a surrogate rhino, remove the nucleus and join it with a Sumatran rhino’s somatic cell. The surrogate will likely be another rhino, either a Sumatran rhino from another country or another species.
This process was previously used to successfully clone Dolly the sheep in 1996.
Dr. Lokman and his colleagues are trying both ways.
With Iman’s death in 2019, the International Rhino Foundation (IRF) declared the species extinct in the wild in Malaysia; while remaining rhinos are scattered across Indonesia and Thailand.
The population's decline was initially caused by poaching for their horns, which were coveted as ingredients in traditional Asian medicine.
By: Aishah Akashah Ahadiat
