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Chinese Cloned Goat Gives Birth to Twins
Chinese Cloned Goat Gives Birth to Twins
Yangyang, a goat cloned from an adult goat's somatic cells, gave birth to twins Wednesday in Xi'an, capital of northwest China's Shaanxi Province.
Scientists successfully delivered the two white baby goats, one male and one female, and said that they were both healthy.
There is no record of a cloned goat becoming pregnant, said Professor Wang Qianghua with the cloning project.
The male twin, named Huanhuan, is 23 cm long and 24 cm tall, and weighs 1.46 kg. The other, Qingqing, is 22.5 cm long and 23 cm tall, and weighs 1.2 kg.
Sources show that Yangyang mated with a 6-year-old male goat, which was cloned from an embryo, without researchers' notice.
Yangyang was the second goat in the world cloned by Chinese scientists from adult somatic cells, following the first one, Yuanyuan, which died only 36 hours after birth due to respiratory failure.
In cloning the goats, Chinese scientists adopted a technique of nuclear transfer, which is different from that used to produce Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned animal, born in 1997 in Scotland.
Sources said scientists removed some cells from the ears of an adult goat and collected some goat oocytes, and cultivated them for future use.
They later injected the nucleus of the donor cells into an enucleated oocyte to develop into embryos, which were then implanted in the surrogate mother goat.
Yangyang and Yuanyuan, both female, were cloned from cells of the same goat, which made them resemble each other.
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