![]() ![]() The two Berlin-based scientists are also co-last authors of the current study. Sebastian Diecke’s Pluripotent Stem Cells Technology Platform at the Max Delbrück Center and with reproduction expert Professor Thomas Hildebrandt from Leibniz-IZW. In the case of the northern white rhinoceros, Hayashi is working in close cooperation with Dr. But for each new species, the individual steps are uncharted territory. To get from a piece of skin to a living rhinoceros may be a true feat of cellular engineering, but the process itself is not unprecedented: the study’s co-last author Professor Katsuhiko Hayashi leads research labs at the Japanese universities of Osaka and Kyushu in Fukuoka, where his teams have already accomplished this feat using mice. And so the northern white rhino subspecies, which humans have already effectively wiped out through poaching, may yet be saved thanks to state-of-the-art stem cell and reproductive technologies. The idea is to implant the resulting embryos into closely related southern white rhino females, who will then carry the surrogate offspring to term. To this end, the scientists are pursuing two strategies – one of them trying to generate viable sperm and eggs from the skin cells of deceased rhinos. The BioRescue project, which is coordinated by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) and has been funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) since 2019, wants to save the northern white rhino from extinction. This represents a major milestone in an ambitious plan. But all hope is not lost: according to a paper published in the journal “Science Advances”, an international team of researchers has successfully cultivated primordial germ cells (PGCs) – the precursors of rhino eggs and sperm – from embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). With just two females left, this white rhino subspecies is no longer capable of reproduction – at least not on its own. They live together in a wildlife conservancy in Kenya. Thirty-three-year-old Najin and her daughter Fatu are the last surviving northern white rhinos on the planet. ![]()
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