It’s a dog’s life, and cloned too...

[michel]

http://www.thestatesman.net/page.new...ess=1&id=85217 It’s a dog’s life, and cloned too...

Steve Connor in London
Aug. 3. — Man’s best friend has joined the long list of animals that have been cloned in the laboratory, but the scientists behind the world’s first cloned dog have warned that the procedure is too dangerous to create carbon copies of favourite pets.
Scientists in South Korea today announced that they have produced a cloned puppy created from skin cells taken from the ear of an adult male Afghan hound. Parts of the cells were incorporated into canine eggs cells to produce more than 1,000 cloned embryos, one of which was carried by a golden labrador acting as a surrogate mother for the cloned puppy.
Since the announcement of Dolly the sheep in 1997 scientists have cloned many different species, including mice, rats, cows, pigs, rabbits, cats, a mule, horses and a gaur — an endangered ox.
However, despite several attempts, a cloned dog has proved elusive because of the difficulty of maturing canine eggs in the artificial surroundings of a cloning laboratory.
Professor Woo-Suk Hwang of Seoul National University and his colleagues overcame the technical problems and today unveiled the result of their research — an Afghan hound called Snuppy, a puppy named after Seoul National University’s initials.
Snuppy was born in April and was one of two cloned dog embryos to be delivered alive. The second, born in May, died of pneumonia just three weeks after birth.
However, in total the scientists created 1,095 cloned embryos and implanted all them into the wombs of 123 canine surrogates. Yet only three pregnancies were confirmed, one of which ended in a miscarriage.
The extremely low success rate — two puppies from 123 surrogate mothers and more than 1,000 embryos — underlines the dangerous nature of the cloning technique used to create clones of adult animals. Prof. Hwang said the aim of the study was to investigate the possibility of creating cloned embryos for producing stem cells rather than to develop a new way of reproducing animals or humans. — The Independent