[FEL-L] Indian scientists hope Iran will help in cloning cheetah

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Indian scientists hope Iran will help in cloning cheetah  
_India_ (http://www2.irna.ir/en/news/menu-235/key-5816/) -_Cloning_ 
(http://www2.irna.ir/en/news/menu-235/key-74088/) -_Iran's Help_ 
(http://www2.irna.ir/en/news/menu-235/key-97654/)  
Scientists at a Laboratory for the Conservation of Endangered Species 
(LaCONE), Hyderabad, capital city of Andhra Pradesh are continuing their efforts to c
lone a rabbit and ope to get assistance from Iran to fulfill their ambitious 
goal - to clone a cheetah.  
This is the country's first animal cloning bid, and the LaCONE scientists, of 
the prestigious Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), want to 
clone a laboratory animal before working on their dream project, IANS reported 
here Saturday.  
It has been over a decade that the scientists at CCMB are talking of cloning 
a cheetah to revive a species that became extinct in India more than four 
decades ago.  
The efforts by Indian authorities to persuade Iran to donate a pair of live 
cheetahs or at least its sperm and tissue samples have not yielded the desired 
results.  
CCMB director Lalji Singh, however, has not lost hope.  
"We hope that we will still be able to convince Iran to help in the project," 
Singh told newspersons in Hyderabad.  
Singh had made a request to then Iranian president Mohammad Khatami when he 
visited CCMB in January 2003.  
Cheetahs are the fastest animals on earth capable of running up to 95 km an 
hour. They were once found in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.  
The cheetah became extinct in India in 1962 because of large-scale hunting.  
Iran is the only country where a close relative of the extinct Indian cheetah 
is found.  
Singh, the first scientist in India to use DNA fingerprinting to solve 
criminal cases, will be talking to a group of Iranian scientists scheduled to visit 
Hyderabad for a joint meeting with their Indian counterparts on stem cell 
research in November.  
He hopes that the discussions between the scientists would prove fruitful.  
Singh, however, said the institute was not pursuing seriously the idea to 
obtain a live animal from Iran. International organizations have told CCMB that a 
cheetah could not be shifted from Iran because India has no natural habitat 
where the animal can be released.  
"We will try to get stem cells from Iran. We want to have a tissue bank where 
frozen tissues can be stored. This facility is still under construction," he 
said.  
The scientists plan to take the genes from live cheetah cells and fuse it 
with empty leopard eggs. Any resulting embryos would then be carried in leopard 
surrogates.  
Singh said there was also an offer of collaboration with South Africa on 
cheetah cloning.  
"One day it (cloning) will be done. I don't know whether we will be able to 
fulfill this in my lifetime," said Singh.  
_http://www2.irna.ir/en/news/view/menu-235/0708259340145740.htm_ 
(http://www2.irna.ir/en/news/view/menu-235/0708259340145740.htm) 



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