Nuclear transfer was the most common way for cloning mammals since the first success of cloning sheep ‘Dolly’; however, there were always difficulties in this method; high cost, low success rate, and need for facility and skilled workforce.
The new technique, handmade cloning, has been brought a great possibility that more cloned animal can be applied to farming and conservation of endangered species.
This new cloning method is developed by Gábor Vajta at the Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences in Tjele together with Ian Lewis, programme leader for the Cooperative Research Centre for Innovative Dairy Products in Australia and carried out by simply chopping the egg in half only one of which contains the nucleus. The other half, cytoplast, is fused with the cell that is going to be cloned and then is fused with another cytoplast to produce the cloned egg. This is apparently twice as efficient and one tenth as costly as pre-existing method since nuclear transfer requires very skilled workforce and expensive tools to remove the nucleus from the egg by using needle. Additionally, it has been reported that handmade cloning is 50% of success rate of pregnant females at 30days compared with 25% for nuclear transfer. The fist pig, George, was successfully cloned by handmade cloning followed by calf created in
Primary reference:
Kouffman, J., 2003, A Wild Earth or a Cloned Zoo? You Decide., Biology Senior Seminor, November 26 2003. viewed 25 May 2008
Secondary reference:
Westphal, S. P., 2002, ‘Handmade’ cloning cheap and easy, New Scientist, 14 August 2002. viewed 25 May 2008
< http://www.newscientist.com/article
/dn2670-handmade-cloning-cheap-and-easy.html>.
Kyoko Sato
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