Xenografting success brings hope for animal conservation

Endangered species could now live forever following research that shows an animal's ovarian tissue grafted onto tissues in another species can produce healthy live young.

Researchers from Monash University are the first to generate healthy live young using ovarian tissue xenografting, a technique where the ovarian tissue of one species is grafted into another.

Although researchers have previously grown eggs contained in the ovaries of one species - wallabies, wombats and elephants - in the body of another, this is the first time live young have been produced.

Ms Melanie Snow, the PhD student who undertook much of the work, said the research team had been exploring xenografting as a means of propagating rare and endangered species. "It overcomes one of the major problems encountered with assisted reproduction techniques in endangered animals - a scarcity of mature, fertilizable eggs," she said.

Dr Shae-Lee Cox, a research fellow in the physiology department, said the technique could be applied to endangered mammalian species as long as in vitro culture and fertilization protocols had been established for the species and there was a surrogate mother available.

"For example, with this technique we could take ovarian tissue from a live or recently dead female of an endangered species, put that tissue into a rat and the immature eggs, which are the most abundant eggs in the ovary, will become mature," Dr Cox said. "We could then remove the eggs grown in the rat host, mix them with the sperm of the endangered species, and then transfer the embryos into a surrogate mother from that endangered species or possibly a closely related species."

Item provided courtesy of Monash University