After two years of painstaking efforts, the Chinese biotechnology company Synogen announced, on September 19, that it had succeeded in cloning the first Arctic wolf from a dog in a Beijing laboratory, in a case that is the first of its kind in the world.
The researchers used donor cells from a female arctic wolf to create 137 new embryos from the developing eggs of a beagle. The team then transplanted 85 embryos into the wombs of seven different dogs, resulting in one healthy wolf.
The cloned wolf, a female named "new Maya" who carries the genes of the original wolf, is expected to live in the arctic-style Harbin Polarland.
Nowadays, Maya lives with her surrogate mother, a beagle, in a Chinese laboratory known for pet cloning.
According to the information, the arctic wolf is descended from the "gray wolves", and is not considered an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Maya is said to be the first arctic wolf to be cloned, but it is not the first mammal. Animal cloning has been going on for more than two decades, since Dolly the sheep was cloned in 1996.