First cloned dog
2005/10/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria
Many animals have already been cloned, but that does not mean that by the development of the technique any animal can clone. Some are easy cloning and some are very difficult. Dogs are in this last group, but some biologists have managed to clone a dog. The team of South Korean biologist Woo Suk Hwang was the first to open a line of stem cell research from cloned human embryos.
The main difficulty in cloning dogs lies in obtaining eggs, as they leave the ovary almost without developing. If the egg is removed at that time, it should develop in a laboratory, which is very difficult. Therefore, biologists have had to extract the oculus later, once developed, but before losing it.
To this difficulty have been added the usual difficulties of cloning in the case of the dog. And it is that many times, although the process seems to go well, the genes are not expressed correctly. Therefore, the experiment advances in very few cases, with 1,095 embryos cloned by South Korean biologists to 123 female dogs, which only caused three pregnancies. Only two children are born of them, caesareans, and one dies of pneumonia.
