What this Discovery Means
difficult and highly technical process, and likely to be extremely expensive for private usage for a long time. Any responsible breeder who goes to the trouble and expense to do an IVF breed- ing is going to do so for very specific reasons, probably with an incredibly special bitch and/or stud dog. No breed- er going to that much effort is going to place those puppies willy-nilly. As for puppy mills, the expense alone is sufficient deterrent. Pup- py mills are all about producing as many puppies for as little cost as pos- sible—and IVF breedings are not going to fit that bill any time soon, probably never. Another concern was that this could allow for “popular bitch syndrome.”
IVF also hopefully gets us one step closer to being able to identify and edit the genes that cause hereditary disor- ders. In the future there is potential that scientists could select eggs and sperm that lack a genetic defect, fertilize the eggs, and then implant the embryos in a surrogate mother to whelp a litter devoid of the defective gene. We’ll have to wait and see how things pan out! What this Discovery Does not Mean The few comments that I read on the first posting of this study on Facebook were disappointing to say the least. We in the dog fancy often bemoan the general public’s lack of knowledge about purebred dogs and breeders,
This successful in vitro fertilization fills a gap in canine reproductive sci- ence. We can now collect and freeze semen, collect mature eggs, collect fer- tilized eggs, freeze and transfer embry- os, and fertilize in vitro. In the dog fancy, freezing semen is already a common practice. We can also potentially do a breeding and then col- lect and freeze the embryos, or collect a bitch’s eggs and save them to do a breed- ing in vitro at a later date. Both of these options could theoretically be useful for allowing a valuable bitch to reproduce without her personally whelping and raising the litter. While the surrogate whelped the litter, the actual dam could
“a bigger thrill of this successful ivf litter is the POTENTIAL BENEFIT THIS PROCEDURE CAN HAVE ON ENDANGERED CANINE SPECIES. scientists can now collect anD store both semen anD eggs from enDangereD canines anD cross them at will to increase genetic Diversity.”
and sadly the general public’s knowl- edge and comprehension of science is equally abysmal. Many of the comments made the nas- ty and erroneous accusation that breed- ers and puppy mills can now produce even more dogs that will just overpopu- late shelters. This is incorrect on many levels. For starters, responsible breed- ers screen homes so that their puppies go to owners who keep them for life. More significantly, IVF for canines is still in its infancy. Even though the team at Cornell was getting 80-90% success rates in fertilization, those embryos can still fail to implant, be rejected by the surrogate bitch’s body, or fail to fully develop for any of the same reasons that traditional breedings fail. It is also a
continue her show career. That said, this is still somewhat in the realm of sci- ence fiction for us, because the expense would be very high and you would need to find a team capable of handling the procedure. A bigger thrill of this successful IVF litter is the potential benefit this proce- dure can have on endangered canine species. Scientists can now collect and store both semen and eggs from endangered canines and cross them at will to increase genetic diversity. A single female can produce a litter with a wide variety of parentage between the pups. That is not to say that endan- gered species will be a thing of the past any time soon, as there are still many challenges ahead.
However, even if every single one of a bitch’s eggs was harvested and resulted in a live puppy, bitches only produce a set number of eggs in their lifetime. Dogs, on the other hand, produce virtu- ally unlimited amounts of sperm which we can very easily store and use to the point of excess. I can’t wait to see what new develop- ments 2016 brings! For More inForMation: 1. http://www.news.cornell.edu/ stories/2015/12/research-leads-first- puppies-born-vitro-fertilization 2. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/ article?id=10.1371/journal. pone.0143930
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