Could a bird embryo develope in another bird's egg?

[EdwardLost]

Just reading a NYT article about scientists recovering DNA from the extinct elephant bird and it got me thinking. Suppose the technology existed to create artificial elephant bird chromosomes and poke them into the egg cell from, say, an ostrich. Would the embryo be able to survive and develop in the ostrich egg?

More concretely: Have bird egg-surrogacy experiments ever been done? Has anyone tried growing a chicken in a duck’s egg or some such? Is a bird egg a “generic” environment or is it very species specific?

[Colibri]

There are some big problems, as this article describes.

Therefore you cannot take a single cloned cell and implant it into an ovary, oviduct, uterus or any reproductive organ and get it to grow – you have to grow it in the lab and then implant a partially developed embryo. This is okay in a uterus because the embryo implants and develops in a fixed place. In a bird, the embryo is in constant motion within the female’s body – literally tumbling down the oviduct as the oviduct coats the eggshell around the embryo. To implant a cloned embryo one would have to take out the developing embryo from within a developing hard shelled egg within the female’s body and replace it with the cloned embryo – and hope that the embryo integrates into the yolk of the egg and that all the puncturing doesn’t deform the egg or harm the female. So you can see it’s very very tricky. By the time the egg actually exits the female’s body the embryo inside it is 50-60,000 cells and already developing tissue types that are integrated into the yolk and amniotic membranes surrounding it. It is not likely to be able to grow a cloned embryo to such an extensive developmental stage. If you could grow an embryo to that point, it may not be viable to remove the egg’s endogenous embryo and “swap” in the cloned embryo, because of how integrated the embryo quickly becomes to the yolk and amniotic tissues.

[EdwardLost]

@Colibri

There are some big problems, as this article describes.

Very interesting article; thank you, Colberi. I guess I can stop googling for “elephant bird saddles”.

[Isilder]

@Colibri

There are some big problems, as this article describes.

Seems to say too much and has leaps of logic.

The egg wouldn’t care if the embryo was removed and replaced with just a zygote.

The original zygote was happy to become a 50,000 cell embryo there,
so why couldn’t a 2nd zygote also do the same ?

The problems are all in getting the zygote to be a happy healthy zygote …

[Colibri]

@Isilder

Seems to say too much and has leaps of logic.

:dubious: It seems quite clear to me.

The egg wouldn’t care if the embryo was removed and replaced with just a zygote.

The original zygote was happy to become a 50,000 cell embryo there,
so why couldn’t a 2nd zygote also do the same ?

The problems are all in getting the zygote to be a happy healthy zygote …

You clearly don’t have any idea of how the egg is organized. It’s not simple. There are a whole set of different membranes, including the amnion, chorion, allantois, and yolk sac. By the time the egg is layed, the embryo has already developed some of these membranes and the connections to them. You couldn’t remove the embryo without destroying these connections. The new embryo would not be able to integrate with the old membranes, including the yolk sac, and would be unable to grow.