SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- The world's first litter of test tube puppies has been born at Cornell University's veterinary college.

Cornell announced today researchers created 19 embryos from canine eggs and sperm in a lab and transferred them into a female dog who gave birth last spring to seven healthy puppies. Genetic testing shows two are from a beagle mother and a cocker spaniel father, and five from two pairings of beagle fathers and mothers.

Since the mid-1970s people have been trying unsuccessfully to do in vitro fertilization -- IVF for short -- in a dog.

Past attempts at canine IVF failed because a female dog's reproductive cycle differs from that of other mammals. Canine eggs retrieved at the same stage of cell maturation as other animals failed to fertilize. Researchers found if they left the egg in the tube leaving the ovary one extra day, the eggs reached the stage where fertilization was most likely to occur.

Cornell said the breakthrough, described in a study in the journal Public Library of Science ONE, may help preserve endangered canine species using assisted reproduction techniques. It may also enable researchers to eradicate inherited diseases in dogs and facilitate the study of genetic diseases in dogs and humans, which share many of the same or similar illnesses.

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