One huge discovery that came out during the year of 1996 was the first successful cloning of dolly the sheep. Dolly was a female domestic sheep, and the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell, using the process of nuclear transfer.She was cloned by Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and his colleagues at the Roslin Institute, in Scotland. She was born on 5 July 1996 and she lived until the age of six, at which point she died from a progressive lung disease. her birth was officially announced on February 22, 1997. The sheep was originally code-named "6LL3".
The technique that was made famous by her birth is somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which a cell is placed in a de-nucleated ovum, the two cells fuse and then develop into an embryo. The cell used as the donor for the cloning of Dolly was taken from a mammary gland, and the production of a healthy clone proved that a cell taken from a specific part of the body could recreate a whole individual. They had to find a way to 'reprogram' the udder cells - to keep them alive but stop them growing – which they achieved by altering the growth medium. Then they injected the cell into an unfertilised egg cell which had had its nucleus removed, and made the cells fuse by using electrical pulses. The unfertilized egg cell came from a Scottish Blackface ewe. When the research team had managed to fuse the nucleus from the adult white sheep cell with the egg cell from the black-faced sheep. They cultured it for six or seven days to see if it divided and developed normally before implanting it into a surrogate mother which was another Scottish Blackface ewe. When Dolly was produced, she ended up with a white face. This development was a huge discovery for the scientific world because many others had tried for a while and were not successful. The advances made through cloning animals have led to a potential new therapy to prevent mitochondrial diseases in humans being passed from mother to child. About 1 in 6000 people are born with faulty mitochondria, which can result in diseases like muscular dystrophy. To prevent this, genetic material from the embryo is extracted and placed in an egg cell donated by another woman, which contains functioning mitochondria. This is the same process that is used in cloning of embryonic cells of animals. Without this intervention, the faulty mitochondria would most defiantly to pass on to the next generation.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/d/dolly_the_sheep.htm
http://www.animalresearch.info/en/medical-advances/151/cloning-dolly-the-sheep/
Portions of your blog entry are directly copied from one of your sources. You must indicate quotes with quotation marks, even in a blog.
ReplyDeleteThe problematic material is posted below directly from the animal research website.
"To produce Dolly, scientists used an udder cell from a six-year-old Finn Dorset white sheep. They had to find a way to 'reprogram' the udder cells - to keep them alive but stop them growing – which they achieved by altering the growth medium (the ‘soup’ in which the cells were kept alive). Then they injected the cell into an unfertilised egg cell which had had its nucleus removed, and made the cells fuse by using electrical pulses. The unfertilised egg cell came from a Scottish Blackface ewe. When the research team had managed to fuse the nucleus from the adult white sheep cell with the egg cell from the black-faced sheep,"