Worlds First Cloned Dog Cloned Again
A family portrait, with clone Snuppy (centre), his clone 'father' and surrogate labrador mother
(Image: Seoul National University)
Cloning dogs has been harder to exercise than other mammals cloned so far
(Prototype: Seoul National Academy)
The globe's first cloned dog has been revealed by researchers. South Korea's "king of cloning", Woo Suk Hwang has successfully cloned an Afghan hound.
The breakthrough is bound to lead to excitement among domestic dog lovers who long to clone their dead pets, but Gerald Schatten at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, U.s.a., has stern words. "We are not in the concern of cloning pets," he says. "We perform nuclear transfer for medical research."
Producing "Snuppy" – or Seoul National Academy puppy – was non easy. Hwang's team put together 1095 eggs containing the Deoxyribonucleic acid of a 3-year-old adult male Afghan, and transferred them into 123 surrogate mothers. Simply 3 pregnancies resulted: one miscarried, and ii others went to term. One of the clones died from pneumonia at 22 days old.
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"Professor Hwang and his colleagues are to be congratulated on another slap-up success," says Ian Wilmut, creator of Dolly the sheep, at the Academy of Edinburgh, UK.
Happy families
The team used somatic cell nuclear transfer, the aforementioned technique used to create Dolly. To clone Snuppy, the researchers implanted nuclei from his male parent'due south ear cells into eggs from female person dogs, having removed the eggs' nuclei.
Later existence zapped with a modest electric daze to start development, the embryos were implanted into the uterus of a surrogate female parent – in Snuppy's case, a labrador. The team used DNA fingerprinting to confirm that Snuppy was genetically identical to his "male parent".
To run across the happy clone family frolicking, click here for a short video (15 MB, avi format, requires RealPlayer or Quicktime).
Research applications
Successful nuclear transfer in dogs has been elusive until now considering it is hard to get egg cells to mature in the lab. Hwang got around the trouble by using naturally ovulated egg cells – those which have naturally been released from the ovaries into the fallopian tubes. Snuppy is the latest mammal to be cloned afterward sheep, mice, cats, rats, cows, goats, pigs, horses, rabbits and a mule.
There are many research applications for cloning in dogs, says Katrin Hinrichs, of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Texas A&M University, US, who was the first to clone a horse in the U.s.. "There are homo diseases for which nosotros have domestic dog models," she says. "It would be of great benefit to have multiple genetically identical animals to study the pathogenesis and handling of these diseases."
Inherited diseases, for instance are a serious problem in purebred dogs. Many, such as malformed hip joints, are influenced past both genetic and environmental factors, and having clones will enable scientists to tease apart these factors.
Dogs in a dish
Schatten, who was office of Hwang's team, says that the cloning of dogs is a stride towards the cloning of canine stem cells. Stem cells can currently just be cloned in mice and human cells.
"In one case stem cells tin can be established it may be possible to learn nigh the genetic footing of traits by studying cells in a dish rather than in the dogs themselves," he says.
Just despite Schatten'due south alarm, many people are likely to immediately look to the possibility of cloning beloved pets. "I am sure that some people volition remember that it is worth spending money to have a puppy with a specific genotype," says Hinrichs.
Why did they choose an Afghan to clone? "Having a distinctive dog means that if nosotros'd [concluded up with] a dachshund we'd know that something funny had happened," says Schatten.
Journal reference: Nature (vol 436, p 641)
Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7785-worlds-first-canine-clone-is-revealed/
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