Chinese Pet-Cloning Company Announces Birth of the World’s First Cloned Arctic Wolf

A brief footage of the birth of the world's first cloned Arctic wolf was released to the world 100 days after it was born.

The cloned female wolf pup (Canis lupus arctos), named Maya was birthed by an unlikely surrogate mother - a beagle - at a laboratory in Beijing, China, ScienceAlert reported. The Sinogene Biotechnology, a Chinese pet-cloning company in Beijing released the video at a press conference held on September 19.

According to the Global Times, the birth of Maya pioneers the breeding of more rare and endangered animals through cloning technology.

"After two years of painstaking efforts, the arctic wolf was cloned successfully. It is the first case of its kind in the world," said Mi Jidong, the company's general manager of the Beijing-based Sinogene Biotechnology Co.

Cloning Tech for Conversation Purposes

Sinogene was first known for specializing in cloning dead pets, such as cats, dogs, and even horses. Now it wants to use its expertise to help clone endangered species for conservation purposes, the Global Times reported.

Maya was cloned using DNA from a skin sample of a fully grown wild female Arctic wolf, also named Maya, that died in captivity at Harbin Polarland. The cloning was accomplished by creating 137 Arctic wolf embryos from enucleated oocytes and somatic cells, of which 85 were successfully transplanted into seven beagle surrogates.

Finally, one out of those transplanted embryos was fully developed during pregnancy. Fortunately, dogs share enough DNA with wolves so the researchers used beagle surrogates to complete the hybrid pregnancy.

Maya now lives at a Sinogene lab in Xuzhou, eastern China with her surrogate mother, but the wolf pup will eventually be transferred to Harbin Polarland to live with other Arctic wolves according to the Global Times. A new partnership with the Beijing Wildlife Park was also announced to clone more captive species in the future.

Cloning Endangered Species

Although arctic wolves, which are a subspecies of gray wolves (Canis lupus) are not an endangered species, they are listed as least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature with disrupted food supply in the coming decades due to climate change, according to WWF. The cloning of Maya brings great significance to the conservation of endangered animals and biodiversity, experts say.

It is also not new for scientists to clone endangered species. In 2020, for example, scientists from US-based company Revive & Restore successfully cloned an endangered black-footed ferret (Mustela nigripes). An endangered Przewalski's horse (Equus przewalskii) was also cloned in the same year.

"Cloning is a drastically underutilized tool," said Ben Novak, lead scientist at Revive & Restore. "In the future, it could be a literal lifeline for species that become rarer or worse, go extinct."

This does not only maintain an amount of genetic diversity within a species, but also gives threatened species a fighting chance to adapt to the selection pressures that are driving them towards extinction, he added.

These 'genetic backups' can also be introduced into the wild to replenish struggling populations, according to Novak, but it should be noted as well that there are some major limitations to cloning.