Males Get Cloned
W A S H I N G T O N -- The small and elite club of clones,restricted until now to females like Dolly the sheep andCumulina the mouse, has gone co-ed with the cloning of a malemouse.
“Fibro” is also the first documented, live mammal cloned from adult cells that do not originate in the reproductive system, which suggests that adult animals can be cloned from any cell in the body at all.
Ryuzo Yanagimachi and Teruhiko Wakayama at the University of Hawaii say the technique is still tricky — they only got one living mouse out of 274 tries — but Fibro seems healthy and normal.
“He fathered two perfectly normal litters as of today (Thursday),” Yanagimachi said in an interview conducted by e-mail. “He is active and healthy.”
Male animals have been cloned before, but only using fetal cells, which are much easier to clone because of their early stage of development.
A Japanese agricultural research institute also said it cloned a calf from the ear of an adult, but the research was not published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal — the standard for science.
It is much harder to clone animals from adult cells — Dolly, some Japanese heifers and Cumulina, the cloned mouse presented to the world by Yanagimachi and Wakayama last year, are rare examples.
First, Female Cells They were made using cells related to reproduction — Dolly from the mammary gland cell of a ewe and Cumulina from so-called cumulus cells, which nurture developing eggs inside the ovaries.
So, many scientists had believed that there might be something unique about females, or perhaps even female reproductive cells, that made them amenable to cloning.
Wakayama and Yanagimachi, writing in the journal Nature Genetics, said it is now clear this is not the case.
“Our results demonstrate that cloning using adult somatic cells is not restricted to female or reproductive cells,” they wrote.
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