Zoo and botanical garden are the most conventional methods of ex-situ conservation where endangered species are bred for possible reintroduction into the wild. Animals whose life is threatened in the wild is captured and kept in a zoo to ensure its continuous existence.

Advantages of Tissue Culture

• Tissue culture is a very fast technique.
• The new plants produced by tissue culture are disease free.
• Tissue culture can grow plants round the year, irrespective of weather or season.
• Very little space is needed for developing new plants by tissue culture.

Method for tissue culture:

1. take explants from the parent plant.
2. transfer to plates containing sterile agar jelly.
3. add plant hormones to stimulate the plant cells to divide.
4. cells grow rapidly into small masses of plant tissue.
5. add more plant hormones to stimulate the growth of roots and stems.

Plants are cloned to produce identical plants quickly and economically. It’s therefore an effective way of producing new individuals from rare and endangered plants, helping to preserve the species. Clones will also be genetically identical to the original plant providing the meristem cells.

And the cloning of animals remains limited—although it is likely growing. Some agricultural cloning is used in the U.S. and China to capitalize on the genes of a few extraordinary specimens, scientists say, but the European Parliament voted last year to ban cloning animals for food.

In terms of section 39A of the Human Tissue Act 65 of 1983, genetic manipulation of gametes or zygotes outside the human body is absolutely prohibited. A zygote is the cell resulting from the fusion of two gametes; thus the fertilised ovum. Section 39A thus prohibits human cloning.

Moreover, most scientists believe that the process of cloning humans will result in even higher failure rates. Not only does the cloning process have a low success rate, the viable clone suffers increased risk of serious genetic malformation, cancer or shortened lifespan (Savulescu, 1999).

Clones are superior breeding animals used to produce healthier offspring. Animal cloning offers great benefits to consumers, farmers, and endangered species: Cloning allows farmers and ranchers to accelerate the reproduction of their most productive livestock in order to better produce safe and healthy food.

At its simplest, cloning works by taking a genetic part of an organism and recreating it in another place. Dolly was cloned using a process known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) which takes a somatic cell, such as a skin cell, and transfers its DNA to an egg cell with its nucleus removed.

At $50,000 a pet, there are unlikely to be huge numbers of cloned cats in the near future. In Britain, the idea is far from the minds of most scientists. “It’s a rather fatuous use of the technology,” said Dr Harry Griffin, director of the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, which produced Dolly.

She was born on 5 July 1996 and died from a progressive lung disease five months before her seventh birthday (the disease was not considered related to her being a clone) on 14 February 2003. She has been called “the world’s most famous sheep” by sources including BBC News and Scientific American.

Dolly was cloned from a cell taken from the mammary gland of a six-year-old Finn Dorset sheep and an egg cell taken from a Scottish Blackface sheep. She was born to her Scottish Blackface surrogate mother on 5th July 1996. Learn more about cloning with our cloning FAQs.

Pyrenean ibex

“There is no point in bringing the dodo back,” Shapiro says. “Their eggs will be eaten the same way that made them go extinct the first time.” Revived passenger pigeons could also face re-extinction. Shapiro argues that passenger pigeon genes related to immunity could help today’s endangered birds survive.