KENYA

• They’ve now decided to freeze sperm from as many genetically diverse male African wild dogs as possible and use this to artificially inseminate female African wild dogs for the first time.
• Reproductive and molecular biologist Damien Paris explains why artificial breeding is the best and most economical way to ensure that genetically diverse wild dogs live on.

Why is the African wild dog in danger?

• They are highly efficient pack hunters but need large home ranges to survive and avoid competitors like lions.
• The problem is that most of the remaining habitats are so small and fragmented that they can’t support large populations anymore.
• Usually, when wild dogs are subadults (around two years old) they move far away and form their own pack.

How can genetic diversity help the African wild dog survive?

• Those diseases can spread rapidly among wild dogs and decimate a pack, which is about five to 20 dogs.
• In 2017, canine distemper virus completely wiped out 21 out of 22 packs of wild dogs in Laikipia County, Kenya in less than four weeks.
• We plan to use sperm freezing and artificial insemination to help distribute genetic diversity between isolated populations.

What conservation methods have been used before?

• To increase genetic diversity, African wild dogs have been translocated (moved) across South Africa since 1998.
• Over several weeks, they form a new genetically mixed pack that is released into the wild.
• A whole population of wild dogs could be lost with the next disease outbreak.

How will sperm freezing and artificial insemination help?

• Our back-up plan against disease outbreaks is to create a bank of African wild dog sperm from multiple males.
• Sperm frozen in liquid nitrogen tanks at very cold temperatures can last 50 or 100 years and still produce offspring.
• We recently improved the freezing technique so African wild dog sperm are now able to swim and survive for eight hours after being thawed.
• We plan to build a consortium so that we can have multiple sperm banks throughout South Africa as back-ups.

Will this be very expensive?

• Some recent modelling in other species found that the hybrid approach was between seven and 84 times cheaper than the natural breeding approach.
• This is because it needed 13-100 times fewer animals to maintain 90% genetic diversity in the population over a 100-year period.

Damien Boyd Bertrand Paul Paris receives funding from Morris Animal Foundation, Roger Willliams Park
Zoo and Fresno Chaffee Zoo. He is affiliated with James Cook University, the Institute for Breeding Rare and Endangered African Mammals, and is a Visiting Fellow of the Mammal Research Institute.

• The Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF), the leading philanthropy empowering young African entrepreneurs from all 54 African countries, has announced the successful entrepreneurs in its tenth selection for the TEF Entrepreneurship Programme.
• The Tony Elumelu Foundation has disbursed US$100,000,000 directly to young African entrepreneurs, who have created over 400,000 direct and indirect jobs, contributing significantly to Africa's economic growth and development.
• Since inception in 2010, the Tony Elumelu Foundation has pioneered an innovative approach to seeding, capacitising and networking young entrepreneurs across Africa.
• To learn more about the Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme "Decade of Impact" please see here ( https://apo-opa.co/3IULYeS ).

• DUBLIN, Ireland, April 04, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Trinity Biotech plc (Nasdaq: TRIB), a commercial stage biotechnology company focused on diabetes management solutions and human diagnostics, including wearable biosensors, today announced results for the quarter ended December 31, 2023 and fiscal year 2023 and key business updates.
• We expect to have fully executed this change by the end of 2024 and expect this will deliver significant annualised savings.
• The assets and liabilities attributable to Fitzgerald Industries have been removed from our Consolidated Balance Sheet as of December 31, 2023.
• Total revenues for Q4, 2023 were $13.4m which compares to $15.7m in Q4, 2022, a decrease of 14.6% and which were broken down as follows:

• The first procedure was performed by Andrea Natale, M.D., F.H.R.S., F.A.C.C., F.E.S.C., cardiac electrophysiologist and executive medical director of TCAI, and Amin Al-Ahmad, M.D., clinical cardiac electrophysiologist.
• Dr. Natale and Dr. Al-Ahmad were two of 67 global operators to participate in the trial that led to FDA approval.
• The novel PFA system delivers short-duration, high-energy electrical pulses to the cardiac tissue to destroy cells that cause irregular heart rhythms without using excess heat or cold.
• "Our team is honored to have played a part in piloting this new era of global innovation for cardiac arrhythmia."