Breeding Racehorses May Have Just Gotten Easier

Attention horse lovers: A new technique could make it easier to breed the next Secretariat or Flicka.

Four new foals have been born from frozen embryos, a tricky task given the structure of horse embryos. The baby horses were born healthy after spending 11 months gestating in mares at a stud farm in France. The new technique could one day help breeders create horses with tailor-made traits, such as racing speed, friendliness or docility.

Tricky embryos

Though children are routinely born from frozen human embryos, horse embryos are much larger — up to 0.02 inches in diameter. This means the eggs contain large amounts of fluid, and this liquid morphs into ice crystals during the freezing process, leading to cell damage. An outer shell also encapsulates horse embryos, foiling the process of cryopreservation, in which cells or tissue are preserved at below-freezing temperatures. Read more...