Scientists clone endangered Asian wild cattle - bantengs CNN - April 2003
A pair of banteng calves born last week were cloned
from an animal that died more than 20 years ago
GM cheese from cow clones BBC - January 2003
Cloned cows in US produce human antibodies August 2002 - New Scientist
June 27, 2001 - Reuters - Athens, Georgia
University of Georgia scientists have cloned eight calves using a technique they say can markedly improve the success rate of cattle cloning. Steve Stice, lead scientist for cloning research at the university in Athens, about 60 miles northeast of Atlanta, said the technique involved the way cells from the breeder animal's DNA were handled. ``Before we used them in the cloning process, we treated them in a different way and made them more consistent, more homogeneous,'' Stice told Reuters late on Tuesday. ``Using a more consistent source material for cloning, it is our belief that we produced more viable embryos.''
Stice did not give more details on the technique, saying the school has applied for a patent. He said the method addresses a common problem in cloning: producing viable animals from cloned embryos.
In a March article in the journal Science, scientists who in 1997 created Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal, said procedures that have been used in cloning animals tend to yield a very low percentage of viable embryos, with many dying soon after birth.
But Stice said the University of Georgia's eight, full-term calves, ranging in age from 2 to 4 months, showed the success rate can be improved. He said the calves, which have identical genetic makeups, are clones of a cow that had grown too old to reproduce. One of the calves was cloned using a combination of the university's technology and that developed by the company that produced Dolly the sheep, the researchers said.
In cloning, an egg's DNA is removed and replaced with the DNA of an adult cell. Mice, dairy cows, goats and pigs are among the mammals that have been cloned since Dolly. Stice said he was optimistic the university's technology could enable researchers to duplicate the genetics of healthy animals to produce meat for consumption that is more consistent in taste and quality.
October 8, 2000 - BBC
Reports from the United States say scientists have, for the first time, cloned an endangered species by using the eggs and the womb of another animal - a cow. According to the Washington Post newspaper, an Asian gaur - a humpbacked, ox-like animal native to India and Burma - was cloned from a single skin cell taken from a dead gaur.
Scientists fused the cell to a cows' egg, whose own genes had been removed, then transferred it to the womb of another cow. The baby gaur, already named Noah, is due to be born next month. The paper says the same team, from biotechnology company Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) in Massachusetts, is already considering cloning giant pandas. The closest related species to giant pandas are rabbits and racoons but neither are ideal as potential surrogate mothers because of their size. The company says it hopes to use captive black bears if they gain access to panda cells from China.
Officials at China's National Zoo, said on Friday they were always open to new ideas but had no plans at present to provide giant panda tissue. Later this year, the Washington Post reports, ACT intends to revive an extinct species of Spanish mountain goat called bucardos. The last known bucardos died nine months ago, but some of the animal's cells were preserved. Normally, a clone shares all the genetic characteristics of the original cell, including sex, which means a breeding population cannot be created. But the ACT team hopes to gain permission from the Spanish authorities to use the latest molecular techniques to insert male chromosomes from a closely related goat species, creating male as well as female bucardos.
August 30, 2000 - AP
University of Tennessee researchers have announced the birth of a cloned dairy cow using a quicker and less complicated method than the method used to clone Dolly the sheep. The researchers said Monday that a brown-and-white calf named Millie, short for Millennium, was born full-term Aug. 23, weighing 62 pounds. She is the third bovine cloned from adult cells born in the United States, but the first Jersey and the first using standard cell-culturing techniques.
The two other cloned cows born in the United States have been produced by researchers at Texas A&M and the University of Connecticut within the past year. Using ultrasound technology, the Tennessee researchers collected ovarian cells from a cow named Teresa. Next, Edwards removed the DNA from the egg of another cow, leaving behind egg cytoplasm. Edwards then joined one of the cultured cells from Teresa to the remaining egg cytoplasm, using a technique called electrofusion. The result was a one-cell cloned embryo that began developing with nuclear DNA entirely from Teresa.
Ninety-five embryos were cultured in the laboratory, allowed to mature for seven days, then transferred to 17 surrogate black Angus beef cows. Millie was among nine pregnancies that resulted and was born after 278 days. A normal pregnancy for Jerseys is 280 days. The researchers said this was achieved without patented techniques to slow the development of the donor egg cells - a so-called quiet state used in cloning two other cows in the United States and Dolly the sheep. "It is significant just to see another lab produce another clone," said Jerry Yang, director of the Transgenic Animal Facility at the University of Connecticut, which cloned a cow using frozen ear cells of a prize Japanese bull.
April 27, 2000 - BBC
Six cows cloned in the US show signs of being biologically younger than their actual age, scientists announced on Thursday. The fact that the process of cloning appears to reverse ageing is a major surprise as Dolly, the cloned sheep, appears biologically older than her age. The ability to produce young cells of any type may prove lifesaving for a host of age-related disorders.Scientists remain unsure why this has happened or whether a longer lifespan will result. But they believe the finding will have a profound impact on the use of cloning for medical purposes. They hope that in the future cloning will enable a patient's own tissue to be used to grow compatible transplant tissue which would also be youthful. Such tissue could be used to treat diseases of ageing such as Alzheimer's, arthritis and heart disease.
The cloning process used by the US and Canadian team seemed to have literally turned back the ageing clock in the cells of the six heifers. One of the researchers, Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology, Massachusetts, told the BBC: "There is a very real possibility that, if this cellular phenomenon transfers into an entire organism, you would end up with a patient or an animal that had a longer life span."
Persephone is nearly one but has the cells of a newborn
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