Larry Lu

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This ‘Poo Zoo’ is harvesting living cells from animal dung 
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Professor Suzannah Williams wishes she didn’t have to spend her days analyzing poop samples. It’s a dirty job; but someone’s got to do it.

Biodiversity is rapidly dwindling, with wildlife populations declining by an average of 73% between 1970 and 2020. For Williams, and her small team at Oxford University in the UK, animal feces contain answers that could help conservationists better monitor wildlife, and perhaps even restore dwindling populations.

When animals defecate, they shed living cells from their intestines, and these can be found on the outside of the dung, says Williams, a professor of fertility and reproductive health.

Living cells contain DNA and genetic information, which can help researchers understand species diversity and could inform breeding programs or conservation efforts.

Typically, wild animals would need to be caught and anesthetized to take a tissue sample, such as a small skin biopsy, which is time-consuming, as well as stressful for the animal, says Williams. Additionally, many laws prevent taking samples for research purposes: in the UK and Europe, taking tissue samples is heavily regulated, unless it directly benefits the health of the individual animal, which makes gathering large amounts of data on genetic diversity tricky, says Williams.

That’s why she started the so-called “Poo Zoo,” established in October 2024 with funding from conservation non-profit Revive and Restore. The project builds on previous research conducted by scientists in Japan, which isolated living cells in mouse stools, although the cells were low quality and contaminated with fecal bacteria, says Williams.

By refining and optimizing methods for cell isolation, Williams hopes to improve the cell quality and offer conservationists a non-invasive way to gather living cell samples — which in the long term could contribute to biobanking, repositories of genetic material, which can be used for IVF efforts for elusive and endangered species

“It’s not that it will make a better sample (than from tissue), that’s definitely not the case. But I can’t walk up to a snow leopard in the wild,” says Williams. “If you did find out where they were pooping, you could put a camera trap and go collect samples, whereas there’s no way you’d be able to collect a sample from those animals otherwise.”

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Larry Lu

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