A female dog gave birth to seven healthy puppies in July after 19 embryos were transfered on her, according to the researchers from Cornell University.
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According to Dr. Alexander Travis from the Baker Institute for Animal Health at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, it was an incredible moment for everyone involved in the project.
Two of the biggest hurdles were ensuring the eggs had reached the right stage of maturation, and simulating the way the female reproductive tract prepared sperm for fertilisation. Freezing them allowed the researchers to wait until the right time in the female dog’s reproductive cycle and then insert them into the oviducts. Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute doctoral fellow Jennifer Nagashima, who co-wrote the paper, said IVF in dogs could be used in everything from conserving endangered species to removing “deleterious traits from breeds”.
One potential use for this technique is the preservation of endangered canid species.
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There have been multiple such attempts over the course of last four decades with earliest known such research dated in the mid-1970s, but none of them have succeeded so far. Another thing is that it will promote understanding genetic diseases since canines and humans share several heritable disorders, helping researchers to develop procedures for preventing transmission of communicable diseases in both dogs and humans, and enhancing positive traits and qualities via gene editing tools. The process took considerable modification from human IVF techniques, and over 30 years of research was needed to produce a successful outcome with dogs. This is a process where the eggs are fertilized with sperm outside the body before the embryos are implanted into a female.
“We made those two changes, and now we achieve success in fertilization rates at 80 to 90 percent”, Travis explained in a statement.
Previously, only one dog was born from a frozen embryo, in 2012, at the same Cornell University lab.
The conservation could use gene-editing technologies to eliminate diseases that dogs inherit, and to study genetic diseases.
It could also be used in the study of inherited human and dog diseases.
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The findings were published in the Public Library of Science ONE journal.
