After research of more than three decades in cloning and producing the first cloned animal, a goat in 2000, China has once again been successful in cloning world’s first rabbit. The Chinese scientists have produced the cloned female rabbit biologically, using the somatic cells of a rabbit fetus.
Dr. Li Shangang who conducted the experiment of rabbit cloning is a researcher at the National Center for Molecular Genetics and Animal Breeding of the Beijing Institute of Animal Sciences.
Dr. Li and his team chose the back skin cells of a 20-day old rabbit embryo. They cultured these cells into fibroblast cell lines. Then these fibroblast cells (donor cells) were fused with an enucleated rabbit’s oocyte (immature egg cell of animal ovary) through electric pulse. Thus cloned embroys were produced which were later transferred into the rabbit’s oviduct. The female clone rabbit was born after a month-long normal pregnancy on February 12 and had weighed 60 grams at birth. Now the rabbit is doing well and is at an animal center in Shanghai.
The first animal to be cloned using somatic cells was the sheep - Dolly in 1996. Since then many other animals as mice, cattle and pigs have been cloned by scientists.
In 2002, French scientists too had claimed to produce the world’s first cloned rabbit but that was done by using cells from an adult female rabbit. However, the Chinese rabbit is the world’s first clone rabbit that has used “fibroblast” cells from a fetal rabbit.
On the achievement, Wang Hongguang, director of the China Center for Biotechnology Development affiliated to the Ministry of Science and Technology said:
Chinese cloning research has reached a global advanced level. We can reproduce almost all the cloning results in top-class laboratories around the world. However, we are lacking in original creations such as the newly cloned rabbit.
Rabbits are considered significant research tools because of their shorter gestation period than other big mammals such as sheep or cows.
Malaysia has also turned to cloning and is in efforts to clone some of its threatened leatherback turtles to save them from extinction.
Source: Reuters
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Is the china gets succes to the movie of cloning.