Fresh effort to clone extinct mountain goat

[Still Waters]

Scientists in Spain have received funding to test whether an extinct mountain goat can be cloned from preserved cells.

The bucardo became extinct in 2000, but cells from the last animal were frozen in liquid nitrogen.

In 2003, a cloned calf was brought to term but died a few minutes after birth.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-25052233

[Ashotep]

I really don't understand bringing this goat back. Has his habitat returned?

[Eldorado]

I really don't understand bringing this goat back. Has his habitat returned?

According to my shepherd sources it was a particularly sexy goat.

[Dave From Down Under]

"According to my shepherd sources it was a particularly sexy goat."

Getting your goat up is one thing, but getting up your goat is a whole new ball game...

[+DieChecker]

I never thought about it before, but it makes sense that you couldn't bring back an entire species without male AND female DNA.

[calaf]

Do we not first ask why it became extinct?

[+DieChecker]

Do we not first ask why it became extinct?

Probably their horns are an Asian medicine.

[Sundew]

I never thought about it before, but it makes sense that you couldn't bring back an entire species without male AND female DNA.

You could mate it with its closest relative, it might not give you a pure species, but when you mate two different but related species you often get something called "hybrid vigor"; the offspring is sometimes more robust than either parent species. It might be a better survivor than the original species that died out.

I am no geneticist and don't know if the technology exists or is advanced enough, but I wonder if you had a male instead of a female if it is possible to produce a female. You would have both a Y (male) chromosome and an X (female) chromosome in each cell. If you could replace the Y in an XY male with an X from a second donor cell, you could I suppose theoretically end up with an XX or in effect, a female. So does anyone know if it would be possible to produce a female offspring from a male parent?

And for that matter, could you replace one of the X chromosomes with a male Y chromosome from a related species? This would make the cloned animal better than 95% of the desired species rather than 50/50 with hybridizaton.