the Official Good luck god bless hammer dahn T-shirt in contrast I will get this Frozen Ark has more samples than the Frozen Zoo — 48,000 from 5,500 species — about 90% of them are made up of DNA rather than live cells, which are used differently and must be stored at much lower temperatures. DNA samples can’t be used to clone an animal but are essential to capture the genetic blueprint of species that might disappear. “That information can be used for a whole range of different scientific studies, from cancer research to understanding recovery processes such as limb regrowth,” says Lisa Yon, an associate professor of zoo and wildlife medicine at the University of Nottingham and a scientific advisor at the Frozen Ark. “By saving these resources we will allow not only current scientists, but future generations of scientists to make all kinds of new discoveries.” At San Diego Frozen Zoo, samples are kept in cryotanks. “The collection is duplicated; periodically we take samples out and move them to another facility, so that all of the cells are not in one place,” says Oliver Ryder. A cell by any other name Freezing cells involves a more delicate process than with DNA, to avoid the formation of ice crystals when cells are frozen to -320 degrees Fahrenheit (-196 Celsius). Different cells require different freezing procedures, too; for example, amphibian cells are difficult to freeze properly and therefore are severely underrepresented in cryobanks. And some of
the Official Good luck god bless hammer dahn T-shirt in contrast I will get this technologies that would make the best use of cell lines still need to be perfected. Related story: ‘If we can make a space station fly, we can save the planet’ “A lot of stuff that we want to do we can’t do yet,” says Tullis Matson of Nature’s Safe, a UK-based cryobank that collects live cells and gametes (sperm and eggs). He predicts that in the next 10 to 30 years it will be possible to turn these cells into pluripotent stem cells, which can be reprogrammed to produce sperm and eggs. Once that’s possible, an embryo could be created from the sperm and egg, and then implanted in a surrogate individual from an endangered species, once again providing much needed genetic diversity. Tullis Matson founded Nature’s Safe in November 2020. “It’s a safety net,” he says. The technique also opens up the prospect of reviving fully extinct species — by using surrogates from the most genetically similar surviving animals. “We do have cells preserved from extinct species, but that’s not really the reason we do this,” says Ryder. “We’ve been asked to preserve cells from some of the last individuals in a species — or literally the last individual — and we do that, but we don’t really expect that we’re going to be able to bring species back from extinction from a single animal.” The challenges ahead The accelerating climate crisis will put ecosystems under further pressure, making the work of cryobanks
