THIS year might see the cloning of two more cat species. Conservationists are attempting to clone the black-footed cat, a small and elusive species native to southern Africa. Next on the list is the world鈥檚 smallest cat, the rusty spotted cat of India and Sri Lanka.
After the birth of the first cloned cat, cc, in December 2001, Martha Gomez and her colleagues at the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species in New Orleans wondered if the technique could help save endangered species. To test the idea, they chose the African wild cat, Felis lybica, because it is closely related to the domestic cat.
In 2003, the team managed to clone African wild cats by transferring their genetic material into the empty eggs of domestic cats and using domestic cats as surrogate mothers. The Audubon Center now has seven surviving African wild cat clones, two males and five females, which they plan to breed conventionally.
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Now the team has its sights set on rarer cat species. At a meeting of the International Embryo Transfer Society in Copenhagen, Denmark, next week, Gomez will describe her team鈥檚 attempts to clone the black-footed cat, Felis nigripes. It is not known how many of these animals remain in the wild. Last year a domestic cat became pregnant after being implanted with cloned black-footed cat embryos, but no kittens survived to term.
Achieving live births might simply be a matter of fine-tuning the method. But it is possible that the black-footed cat is too distantly related to the domestic cat for interspecies cloning to work. To find out, Gomez鈥檚 team is considering transferring normal black-footed cat embryos to domestic cats to see if any survive.
This year the researchers will also try to clone the rusty spotted cat, using frozen cells from a cat that died in a US zoo. There are only 13 of these cats in captivity, and those that remain in the wild are threatened by hybridisation with domestic cats. Cloning certainly won鈥檛 solve all the problems, Gomez stresses, but it could be a useful tool for conservationists (麻豆传媒, 19 June 2004, p 36).
But even with domestic cats, on which the most research has been done, success is not guaranteed. The California-based company Genetic Savings & Clone was due to deliver cloned kittens to its first five customers months ago. Yet it was only at the end of last year that its first cat, called Nicky, was delivered.
So what about big cats like the beleaguered tiger? Gomez thinks that because lions and tigers can interbreed, it might be possible to clone tigers using lions as egg donors and surrogate mothers. 鈥淏ut that鈥檚 for the future,鈥� she says.
