Science

Scientists clone extinct frog that gives birth from its mouth

Scientists clone extinct frog that gives birth from its mouth
An artist’s impression of the gastric-brooding frog that was cloned by scientists working on the Lazarus Project (Artwork: Peter Schouten)
An artist’s impression of the gastric-brooding frog that was cloned by scientists working on the Lazarus Project (Artwork: Peter Schouten)
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An artist’s impression of the gastric-brooding frog that was cloned by scientists working on the Lazarus Project (Artwork: Peter Schouten)
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An artist’s impression of the gastric-brooding frog that was cloned by scientists working on the Lazarus Project (Artwork: Peter Schouten)

Australian scientists have successfully revived and reactivated the genome of an extinct frog. The "Lazarus Project" team implanted cell nuclei from tissues collected in the 1970s and kept in a conventional deep freezer for 40 years into donor eggs from a distantly-related frog. Some of the eggs spontaneously began to divide and grow to early embryo stage with tests confirming the dividing cells contained genetic material from the extinct frog.

The extinct frog in question is the Rheobatrachus silus, one of only two species of gastric-brooding frogs, or Platypus frogs, native to Queensland, Australia. Both species became extinct in the mid-1980s and were unique amongst frog species for the way in which they incubated their offspring. After the eggs were fertilized by the male, the female would then swallow the eggs until they hatched. The tadpoles would then develop in the female’s stomach for at least six weeks – during which time the female would not eat – before being regurgitated and raised in shallow water.

With the aim of bringing the frog back from extinction, the Lazarus Project team took fresh donor eggs from the Great Barred Frog, another Australian ground-swelling frog that is distantly related to the gastric-brooding frog. The scientists inactivated the egg nuclei from the donor eggs and replaced them with dead nuclei from the extinct frog in a technique known as somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), which was the basis for the cloning of Dolly the sheep and, more recently, 581 clones from one “donor” mouse.

Although none of the embryos survived longer than a few days, the work is encouraging for others looking to clone a variety of currently-extinct animals, such as the woolly mammoth, dodo, Cuban red macaw and New Zealand’s giant moa.

“We are watching Lazarus arise from the dead, step by exciting step,” says the leader of the Lazarus Project team, Professor Mike Archer, of the University of New South Wales, Sydney. “We’ve reactivated dead cells into living ones and revived the extinct frog’s genome in the process. Now we have fresh cryo-preserved cells of the extinct frog to use in future cloning experiments.

“We’re increasingly confident that the hurdles ahead are technological and not biological and that we will succeed. Importantly, we’ve demonstrated already the great promise this technology has as a conservation tool when hundreds of the world’s amphibian species are in catastrophic decline.”

Professor Archer spoke last week at the TEDx DeExtinction event in Washington, D.C., where he talked publicly about the Lazarus Project for the first time, as well as his ongoing interest in cloning the extinct Tasmanian tiger.

The Lazarus Project team's results are yet to be published.

Source: University of New South Wales

15 comments
15 comments
Australian
"Survival of the fittest" will be consigned to history.
Trystan Knight
If this is being done in the scientific community in the name of "bettering" the human race...ladies you may have a difficult choice to make sometime in the future. ಠ_ಠ
Molly Cruz
If the eggs were hatched in the stomach, it would seem that chemistry or its lack would affect the successful development of the embryos. What's in a frog's stomach? If it's anything like ours, it's an acid so strong it can burn holes in paper. Very interesting!
VirtualGathis
@Australian: "Survival of the fittest" has already been consigned to history. It began its phase out with the beginning of the industial revoultion. When humans began radically altering their environment we changed the rules, and survival of the fittest was one of the first we changed out of greed and/or "compassion."
Buellrider
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is for flora and we certainly need one for fauna. I hope that they are successful in bringing these frogs back from extinction. It's just too bad that we have to ruin habitat for personal gain. Man is a pestilence and scourge upon this green earth.
Jeff Vandervort
Wow, here and I thought people were natural. Thus our actions were natural. Guess not. I think it's time for those that see people as pestilence to lead the way. I'm sure that'll happen right after Al Gore drives a golf cart, lives in a recycled container and flies economy.
KRC1023
Does Anyone else here know what happened in Jurassic Park? Just Sayin'...
Heather Bowman
Buell rider if man is derived from nature then what is happening is natural, if not perhaps you should sell your Buell and walk?
Azar Attura
Hmm... if this was applied to the human race, then we might be calling men "Daddy Seahorses"
JAT
Jurassic Park here we come..
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