To give "immortality"

Is it possible to clone a cloned dog?

Evgenia Efimova, Vesti

According to science fiction stories, clones are never perfect copies of the original organism. And copies of clones may even turn out to be strange and even "sloppy". But let's go back to the real world, where animal cloning is still considered a relatively new technique. A team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign decided to find out what the actual consequences of cloning a clone are.

To this end, experts have made several clones of Snoopy – the world's first cloned dog. And so far the results have been generally positive.

Snoopy clones at the age of two months (Kim et al., 2017) – VM.

Let's explain that the Afghan hound dog Snoopy was born in Seoul in 2005. In total, the animal lived for ten years – an ordinary life span for such a breed.

It is noteworthy that after cloning Dolly the sheep, scientists around the world began to "copy" many other animals, but they could not do the same with a dog because of the problems of maturation of the eggs of these animals in an artificial environment. And only the specialists of Seoul National University managed to achieve the result. The puppy was given a nickname consisting of a combination of the first letters of the name of Seoul National University (SNU) and the word "puppy" – Snoopy.

However, a 2013 study showed that it is quite possible to successfully clone 25 generations of mice. In other words, scientists were able to produce 26 generations of clones from one mouse. Scientists have concluded that cloning is an effective technology, and potentially it can be used to clone animals indefinitely.

By the way, scientists studying Dolly sheep clones have also convinced us of this. They also concluded that animal clones can have a long and healthy life.

"The results of the study showed that our method avoids the accumulation of genetic abnormalities in the cloning process," said Professor Teruhiko Wakayama, head of the research group. He also noted that cloning technology with such a level of efficiency can be used for the needs of agricultural livestock or for the conservation of rare animal species.

So, scientists intend to "resurrect" the wingless loon 200 years after its disappearance.

Let's add that Chinese specialists went even further: this year they brought out the world's first genetically modified cloned dog. Such technology, scientists say, will help fight diseases in our younger brothers – for example, diabetes, as well as many genetic abnormalities.

The results of the study are presented in the scientific publication Scientific Reports (Kim et al., Birth of clones of the world's first cloned dog).

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