Name: Poo Zoo: How animal dung could help save endangered species
Uploaded: 2025-11-12T14:35:00.306Z
Duration: 4 min 33 s
Description: By harvesting living cells from dung, scientists aim to boost breeding programs and protect species from extinction across the globe.

By harvesting living cells from dung, scientists aim to boost breeding programs and protect species from extinction across the globe.

Chester

Researchers at Chester Zoo, in collaboration with the University of Oxford, are collecting animal dung to extract and bank living cells as part of the PooZoo project. The goal is to preserve genetic material from species such as elephants, giraffes, and rhinoceroses, potentially enabling future conservation efforts through advanced reproductive technologies.

The process involves isolating viable cells from fecal samples, with the hope of eventually generating stem cells that could be used to create eggs or sperm in the laboratory. While the technology is still in its early stages and faces significant challenges, scientists believe this non-invasive approach could increase genetic diversity and help protect endangered species from extinction.

Poo Zoo: How animal dung could help save endangered species

You might think this isn't such a promising sight, but you'd be wrong. This dung is being carefully collected. Keepers at Chester Zoo separately bag up the excrement of animals such as elephants, giraffes and okapis. The samples get sent to a laboratory where they form the basis for the PooZoo project. The idea behind PooZoo is actually taking cells from faecal material, banking them in what we call a living state, so they're still alive, and it could be used in 30, 40 years from now to save species. That's the gist of what we're trying to do. But it is a bit of a dirty business, and it's very difficult to kind of get some of those cells from the faecal material. For Sue Walker, this project is overdue. It offers a slender chance of preserving species such as the endangered rhinoceros. One of the challenges that we've got in conservation right here, right now, is that we've got an alarming rate of species loss. So we're losing species across the globe faster than we can save them. The project is being led by the University of Oxford and funded by the US conservation non-profit Revive and Restore. It's a first for the scientists. So it was literally like, right, how do we do this? You know, you get a faecal sample, it's full of bacteria, it's got cells, but we don't want bacteria, so how do we separate those out? How do we get our nice clean cells? How do we confirm they're the cells we want? They launched the project in October 2024, and they now have managed to isolate some cells in a time-consuming process. I process the sample through a number of washing steps. So I will wash the outside of the faecal matter, and then I'll have a wash that is containing lots of these cells, as well as other, you will get a little bit of faecal debris and some bacteria. And I then do a number of different washing steps. So we are removing the debris and the bacteria. So we end up with this nice clean sample of cells at the end. After the various cells have been isolated, in a next step, the scientists will try something completely new, extracting stem cells from the cells in the excrement. Success is far from guaranteed. But if it does work, it will take years, and it would offer many opportunities. With the long-term idea that we will be able to culture them and also potentially generate stem cells from them, so de-differentiate the cells into stem cells. And with those, then we hope to maybe use them for conservation, which you can do potentially in vitro gametogenesis, where you generate new eggs or sperm in the lab. The challenge you have is that that technology doesn't completely exist for everything at the moment. It's actually been done in mice, that theory in terms of taking cells and turning them into sperm and eggs actually has been done, but it's definitely not been done for faecal material. But then in practice, in theory, it should all work. They're living cells, you should be able to take them, bank them and store them and use them in the future. Getting hold of the raw material is neither time-consuming nor expensive. It's also easy on the animals. They don't have to be stunned, as would normally be the case when cell samples are taken. Taking faecal material, there's huge amounts of it available. And it's non-invasive, and we can get it when we want. And we can not only collect it from animals that are in our care at the zoo, but you could collect it from wild populations. So it kind of, if we can get it to work, it opens up the possibilities of basically banking more genetic variation when we're trying to save these species. Even if this is still a dream, the researchers hope that this new approach will protect some animal species from extinction in the long term and help preserve biodiversity. For more UN videos visit www.un.org

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