Zoo scientists clone rare horse from cells frozen for 40 years
SAN DIEGO >> Kurt looks and acts like any other young horse. He scampers and strides on springy legs, testing their strength. When it’s time to recharge, he nuzzles up to his mother for some nourishing milk.
But Kurt is no ordinary horse. Kurt is a clone.
The 2-month-old colt is a Przewalski’s horse, a species native to central Asia that once went extinct in the wild and is still critically endangered, with only about 2,000 remaining.
San Diego Zoo Global researchers have high hopes that Kurt can help turn things around for his species. He was cloned from skin cells taken from a stallion in 1980 and safeguarded at the Frozen Zoo, San Diego Zoo Global’s vast repository of 10,000 cell lines from more than 1,100 species and subspecies.
“By ‘bringing cells to life,’ if you will, making an animal out of a cell, we can bring back a portion of the gene pool that would otherwise be lost,” said Oliver Ryder, director of genetics at San Diego Zoo Global.
It’s the first time anyone has successfully cloned a Przewalski’s horse, which is only the third species San Diego Zoo Global has ever cloned — joining the gaur and banteng, two endangered cattle species cloned in the early 2000s.
Every Przewalski’s horse alive is related to 12 wild ancestors. That doesn’t bode well for any species, as it takes genetic diversity to adapt to habitat changes and fight off new diseases.
So researchers were excited to find a stallion with pieces of DNA that were largely missing from the rest of his kind.
Think of it this way. Each of your parents passed down half of their genetic material to you, which means there’s a half you didn’t get from each of them. If you have a sibling, they probably got at least some of that half. And the more siblings you have, the more DNA your parents have passed down to future generations.
The plan is to eventually bring Kurt to the zoo’s Safari Park, where he’ll join the park’s 14 Przewalski’s horses as part of a conservation and breeding program.
But the Safari Park won’t be trotting him out any time soon, according to Ryder.
That’s because Kurt still needs at least another year with his surrogate mother and then learn how to interact with other young horses.