The litter is made up of two beagle cross cocker spaniel puppies, and five beagle puppies from two different sets of parents.
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‘We had people lined up, each with a towel, to grab a puppy and rub them and warm them up, ‘ Alex Travis, a specialist in reproductive biology at Cornell University, said.
The findings were published Wednesday in PLOS ONE, and discussed in a statement by Cornell University.
According to CNN, Travis explained that the two changes the team decided to make for the creation of the IVF puppies gave them “success in fertilization rates at 80 to 90%”.
“So in vitro fertilisation is a very important tool that we can use for those endangered species to propagate individuals, particularly when you have very small populations”.
The first dogs were born using in vitro fertilization in Alexander Travis’ laboratory.
In a major breakthrough, researchers at Cornell University in the USA successfully used in vitro fertilisation technique on a dog that resulted in the birth of a litter of puppies.
Louise Brown Oldham, the first human born by IVF – or so-called “test tube baby” – was born in 1978.
In vitro fertilization involves fertilizing an egg with a sperm in a lab, and then transferring the embryo into a female host.
Altering the cell culture where the egg was fertilized also helped, they wrote.
However, using new technology, scientists could genetically edit the embryos of dogs before implantation to eliminate specific problems. Travis and colleagues delivered Klondike, the first puppy born from a frozen embryo in the Western Hemisphere in 2013.
Scientists froze and stored the embryos which allowed them to insert them into the surrogate mother’s oviducts at the right time in her reproductive cycle, which only occurs once or twice a year. “Domestic dogs exhibit spontaneous occurrence of cancers, and as pets, they are exposed to environmental factors common to humans”.
They are just shy of five months old.
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Co-authors include Nucharin Songsasen, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, National Zoological Park. “This gives the ability to freeze embryos and perform IVF later to revive a species that may have been brought to extinction”, Casal said. Additionally, the cryopreservation technique can help wildlife conservationist in their fight to preserve the Earth’s species.
