Evaluation of different skin regions derived from a postmortem jaguar, Panthera onca (Linnaeus, 1758), after vitrification for development of cryobanks from captive animals

Abstract

Biological resource banks represent valuable tools for the conservation of species vulnerable to extinction, such as the jaguar. Cryobanks of skins have the potential to safeguard rare genotypes, allowing the potential exploitation of biological samples in animal multiplication technologies and the study of genetic variability. Determination of the most suitable skin regions for tissue conservation can help increase the efficiency of cryobanks and the storage of biological samples. To this end, we evaluated the effects of vitrification of skin tissues from the ear, caudal, and femoral regions of a post-mortem jaguar belonging to a zoo in Brazil. Nonvitrified and vitrified samples were evaluated and compared using quantitative methods, focusing on skin thickness, cell quantification, number of perinuclear halos, collagen and elastic density, and proliferative activity. No differences were observed in skin thickness, number of perinuclear halos, elastic density, and proliferative activity between non-vitrified and vitrified tissues in skin from any region. However, vitrified tissues derived from femoral skin showed a reduction in the number of fibroblasts, epidermal cells and collagen density compared to nonvitrified tissues. In summary, the ear and caudal regions provided the best conservation of somatic tissues derived from jaguars, and skin samples from these regions are therefore the most suitable for the formation of cryobanks.

One Conservation: the integrated view of biodiversity conservation

“…Strategies for the conservation of Brazilian fauna thru germplasm cryopreservation and storage in biobanks are being taken (Machado et al, 2016;Miranda et al, 2019;Praxedes et al, 2018a). Gametes of different species are being collected and cryopreserved (Araujo et al, 2020;Carelli et al, 2017;Silva et al, 2020b;Silva et al, 2019a, b) as well as somatic cells (Praxedes et al, 2018b) and fibroblasts and different tissues such as testicular (Silva et al, 2020a), ovarian (Campos et al, 2019b), skin from post-mortem animal (Machado et al, 2017;Santos et al, 2021), preantral follicles (Campos et al, 2019a) and even somatic feather follicle cell (Cardoso et al, 2020). Although these biotechnologies are extremely promising for the conservation of species, it is important to note that many of them have not yet been successful in free-living animals.…”