World's first cloned foal
I fail to see the sense and benfits in cloning animals. Does anybody agree with animal cloning, and why?
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From www.theage.com.au
World's first cloned foal
Deborah Smith
August 7, 2003
The cloned foal with her mother.
Picture: Giovanna Lazzari
The world's first cloned foal has been born. And in a double first, the mare that bore her is the horse from which she was copied, making mother and daughter genetically identical twins. Named Prometea, the Haflinger foal was created by Italian researchers.
While sheep, pigs, cattle, mice, rabbits, cats and mules have all been cloned, horses have proved extremely difficult. In May, a mule was the first member of the horse family to be cloned.
Prometea was the only survivor out of 328 cloned embryos made by taking a skin cell and fusing it with an empty egg.
The embryos were placed in a number of surrogate mothers, and it was by chance that the one destined to survive had been placed in the mare that provided the skin cells for cloning.
The researchers said the birth challenged the accepted wisdom that a mother's immune system had to recognise a baby as different for a pregnancy to succeed.
http://www.theage.com.au/ffxImage/ur...ONED_HORSE.jpg
