Peru has become the first country in the world to clone alpacas. With a team headed by Martha Valdivia Cuya at the University Mayor de San Marcos, this pioneering work is already taking place.

“In alpacas this is new,” Valdivia told Agencia Andina, according to Peru Reports. “Nobody has divided the alpaca embryo before. No group in the world has done it. With this project, we will be able to divide the embryo into two equal parts to then transfer them”, she continues.

The funding comes from winning a government-initiated competition called Innóvate Perú (Innovate Peru), and the team consists of 25 people, among them biologists, veterinarians, zoologists, teachers, and postgraduate students.

According to information from Peru Reports, this group has experience with cloning cows and have learned from the cloned sheep Dolly’s case.
“They are working with an abattoir to harvest sperm and ovaries to freeze and then carry out In Vitro Fertilization. Once this has occurred, they will split the cell to create clones, the same process that creates identical twins in humans, before placing them inside female alpacas to gestate.”, you can read on this website.
Valdivia said that cloning alpacas is of national importance because there are populations that rely on these animals for food and transportation, as well as their wool for keeping warm. “The Borgen Project report (sic) that alpacas in the Andes are dying off in large numbers due to the cold, which even caused Peru to declare a state of emergency in 2016.”, Peru Reports informed.

The first cloned alpacas should be born within a year.

(Source)

(Cover Photo Wikimedia Commons)

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