Archive
Oak trees are iconic. They're also threatened with extinction. San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance is committed to protecting these keystone species.
Technology is making a powerful difference in the world of conservation, and our teams are at the forefront.
An unusual set of twins is duplicating hope for Przewalski's horses.
SAN DIEGO (Jan. 9, 2024) – To apply cutting-edge technology to the conservation of koalas, San Diego Wildlife Alliance is partnering with Illumina, a leading genomic sequencing technology company, through the Illumina iConserve program to sequence the whole genomes (an individual’s complete set of DNA) of nearly 100 koalas residing in North America over the past 30 years. Whole genome sequencing is integral to learning more about Koala Retrovirus, KoRV – a virus that can insert into the koala genome and is associated with various health issues in koalas including immunosuppression and cancer.
The Animal Biobanking for Conservation Specialist Group is organizing a worldwide effort to collect, bank, and share genetic resources.
SAN DIEGO (Nov. 30, 2023) – Scientists at San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance have achieved a major milestone in saving wildlife species: With a blue-eyed black lemur’s cells recently added to its Wildlife Biodiversity Bank’s Frozen Zoo®, the nonprofit conservation organization’s unique collection of genetic material now contains 11,00o individual cell lines from more than 1,250 species and subspecies—some critically endangered. No other biobank in the world has a comparable number of living cell lines, with the potential to reverse losses of genetic diversity and contribute to population sustainability for endangered and threatened wildlife species.
Biodiversity banking is a critical component of conservation, and the need for it is more urgent than ever.
SAN DIEGO (Oct. 11, 2023) – San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance has been recognized for its expertise in wildlife biobanking, and has partnered with the Species Survival Commission (SSC) of the world’s largest conservation organization—the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)—to form the new Center for Species Survival: Biodiversity Banking. The new center is the first ever to have a strategy focus rather than a taxonomic one.
In the face of increasing biodiversity loss, biobanks like ours play an essential role in conservation.