Chinese scientists clone first rhesus monkey to live into adulthood, with tweak to process behind Dolly the sheep
Researchers affiliated to China’s premier science academy have successfully cloned the first rhesus monkey to survive into adulthood.
Retro, now three years old, was born after the team added an extra step to the conventional cloning method.
Identical cloned monkeys such as these could be used to study diseases and drug efficacy without genetic difference interfering with the results, according to the team based in Beijing and Shanghai.
The scientists also said that the extra step added to the cloning method could have future applications in human assisted reproduction.
Retro is the first of his species – and only the second primate species ever – to be successfully cloned.
He was just over two years old when the team – from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ (CAS) neuroscience and genetics and developmental biology institutes – began writing a paper on their achievement. It was published in the peer-reviewed, open access journal Nature Communications on Tuesday.
A previous attempt to clone rhesus monkeys in 2020 using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), the conventional cloning method, did result in a live birth, but the monkey died within a day. Rhesus monkeys are used in research to study human infections and immune response, due to their similar genetic make-up.
Cloning could allow researchers to produce “a large number of genetically uniform monkeys that can be used for drug efficacy tests”, Poo Mu-ming, director of the CAS Institute of Neuroscience (ION), told the journal.
This would allow researchers to examine the impact of drugs “without the interference of genetic background”, he said. (South China Morning Post)
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