After Dolly sheep there is now also the horse Kurt. The former entered the history books as the first adult cloned mammal, the latter will ensure the survival of the wild Przewalski horses.
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“He is completely healthy and normal”, it sounds. “He headbuts and kicks it when he feels threatened. And he asks for milk from his surrogate mother. ” The San Diego Zoo in California has succeeded in cloning a przewalski horse for the first time. The foal named Kurt was born on August 6 to a surrogate dam in Texas. He is a clone of a male Przewalski horse whose DNA was frozen some 40 years ago.
The birth of Kurt is exceptional, although he is not the first cloned horse. Scientists set to work with numerous domesticated animals after the world’s most famous clone, the sheep Dolly, was successfully born in 1996. Fish, mice, pigs, dogs, camels, goats and a few smaller monkey species have already been ‘duplicated’ in the past. But for wild species, such as the przewalski horse, the technique is still very new.
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Twelve ancestors
And the birth of Kurt is not only exceptional, but also very important. Around 1960, the przewalski horse was labeled ‘extinct in the wild’ and the horses could only be found in the zoo. “Intensive breeding programs have restored the wild species, but have resulted in significant genetic losses.” Wild przewalski horses can be found again today on the grassy plains of China and Mongolia, but they can all be traced back to twelve ancestors. And that inbreeding is not good news for the survival of the species.
Kurt must now change that. He provides new genetic material and hopefully for progeny that in turn is genetically different.
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