Category Archives: Cloning

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Reviving woolly mammoths will take more than two years BBC News In 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. Many different mammalian species have since been cloned, but the elephant is not among them. Cloning research suggests that, just because it is possible to clone one type ...

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Reviving woolly mammoths will take more than two years - BBC News

Its been 20 years since scientists in Scotland told the world about Dolly the sheep, the first mammal successfully cloned from an adult body cell. What was special about Dolly is that her parents were actually a single cell originating from mammary tissue of an adult ewe. Dolly was an exact genetic copy of that sheepa clone.

Dolly captured peoples imaginations, but those of us in the field had seen her coming through previous research. Ive been working with mammalian embryos for over 40 years, with some work in my lab specifically focusing on various methods of cloning cattle and other livestock species. In fact, one of the coauthors of the paper announcing Dolly worked in our laboratory for three years prior to going to Scotland to help create the famous clone.

Dolly was an important milestone, inspiring scientists to continue improving cloning technology as well as to pursue new concepts in stem cell research. The endgame was never meant to be armies of genetically identical livestock.Rather, researchers continue to refine the techniques and combine them with other methods to turbocharge traditional animal breeding methods as well as gain insights into aging and disease.

Dolly was a perfectly normal sheep who became the mother of numerous normal lambs. She lived to six and a half years, when she was eventually put down after a contagious disease spread through her flock, infecting cloned and normally reproduced sheep alike. Her life wasnt unusual; its her origin that made her unique.

Before the decades of experiments that led to Dolly, it was thought that normal animals could be produced only by fertilization of an egg by a sperm. Thats how things naturally work. These germ cells are the only ones in the body that have their genetic material all jumbled up and in half the quantity of every other kind of cell. That way when these so-called haploid cells come together at fertilization, they produce one cell with the full complement of DNA. Joined together, the cell is termed diploid, for twice, or double. Two halves make a whole.

From that moment forward, nearly all cells in that body have the same genetic makeup. When the one-cell embryo duplicates its genetic material, both cells of the now two-cell embryo are genetically identical. When they in turn duplicate their genetic material, each cell at the four-cell stage is genetically identical. This pattern goes on so that each of the trillions of cells in an adult is genetically exactly the samewhether its in a lung or a bone or the blood.

In contrast, Dolly was produced by whats called somatic cell nuclear transfer. In this process, researchers remove the genetic material from an egg and replace it with the nucleus of some other body cell. The resulting egg becomes a factory to produce an embryo that develops into an offspring. No sperm is in the picture.Instead of half the genetic material coming from a sperm and half from an egg, it all comes from a single cell. Its diploid from the start.

Dolly was the culmination of hundreds of cloning experiments that, for example, showed diploid embryonic and fetal cells could be parents of offspring. But there was no way to easily know all the characteristics of the animal that would result from a cloned embryo or fetus. Researchers could freeze a few of the cells of a 16-cell embryo, while going on to produce clones from the other cells. If a desirable animal was produced, they could thaw the frozen cells and make more copies. But this was impractical because of low success rates.

Dolly demonstrated that adult somatic cells also could be used as parents. Thus, one could know the characteristics of the animal being cloned.

By my calculations, Dolly was the single success from 277 tries at somatic cell nuclear transfer. Sometimes the process of cloning by somatic cell nuclear transfer still produces abnormal embryos, most of which die. But the process has greatly improved so success rates now are more like 10 percent; its highly variable, though, depending on the cell type used and the species.

More than 10 different cell types have been used successfully as parents for cloning. These days most cloning is done using cells obtained by biopsying skin.

Genetics is only part of the story. Even while clones are genetically identical, their phenotypesthe characteristics they expresswill be different. Its like naturally occurring identical twins: They share all their genes but theyre not really exactly alike, especially if reared in different settings.

Environment plays a huge role for some characteristics. Food availability can influence weight. Diseases can stunt growth. These kinds of lifestyle, nutrition, or disease effects can influence which genes are turned on or off in an individual; these are called epigenetic effects. Even though all the genetic material may be the same in two identical clones, they might not be expressing all the same genes.

Consider the practice of cloning winning racehorses. Clones of winners sometimes also will be winnersbut most of the time theyre not. This is because winners are outliers. They need to have the right genetics, but also the right epigenetics and the right environment to reach that winning potential. For example, one can never exactly duplicate the uterine conditions a winning racehorse experienced when it was a developing fetus. Thus, cloning champions usually leads to disappointment. On the other hand, cloning a stallion that sires a high proportion of race-winning horses will result very reliably in a clone that similarly sires winners. This is a genetic rather than a phenotypic situation.

Even though the genetics are reliable, there are aspects of the cloning procedure that mean the epigenetics and environment are suboptimal. For example, sperm have elegant ways of activating the eggs they fertilize, which will die unless activated properly. With cloning, activation usually is accomplished by a strong electric shock. Many of the steps of cloning and subsequent embryonic development are done in test tubes in incubators. These conditions are not perfect substitutes for the female reproductive tract where fertilization and early embryonic development normally occur.

Sometimes abnormal fetuses develop to term, resulting in abnormalities at birth. The most striking abnormal phenotype of some clones is termed large offspring syndrome, in which calves or lambs are 30 or 40 percent larger than normal, resulting in difficult birth. The problems stem from an abnormal placenta. At birth, these clones are genetically normal, but are overly large, and tend to be hyperinsulinemic and hypoglycemic. (The conditions normalize over time once the offspring is no longer influenced by the abnormal placenta.)

Recent improvements in cloning procedures have greatly reduced these abnormalities, which also occur with natural reproduction, but at a much lower incidence.

Many thousands of cloned mammals have been produced in nearly two dozen species. Very few of these concern practical applications, such as cloning a famous Angus bull named Final Answer (who recently died at an old age) in order to produce more high-quality cattle via his clones sperm.

But the cloning research landscape is changing fast. The driving force for producing Dolly was not to produce genetically identical animals. Rather, researchers want to combine cloning techniques with other methods in order to efficiently change animals geneticallymuch quicker than traditional animal breeding methods that take decades to make changes in populations of species such as cattle.

One recent example is introducing the polled (no horns) gene into dairy cattle, thus eliminating the need for the painful process of dehorning. An even more striking application has been to produce a strain of pigs that is incapable of being infected by the very contagious and debilitating PRRS virus. Researchers have even made cattle that cannot develop Mad Cow Disease. For each of these procedures, somatic cell nuclear transplantation is an essential part of the process.

To date, the most valuable contribution of these somatic cell nuclear transplantation experiments has been the scientific information and insights gained. Theyve enhanced our understanding of normal and abnormal embryonic development, including aspects of aging, and more. This information is already helping reduce birth defects, improve methods of circumventing infertility, develop tools to fight certain cancers, and even decrease some of the negative consequences of agingin livestock and even in people. Two decades since Dolly, important applications are still evolving.

George Seidel, professor of biomedical sciences, Colorado State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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It's Been 20 Years Since We Cloned A Sheep. Why Haven't We ... - GOOD Magazine

First, it was Facebook-owned Instagram. Now it is WhatsApp, another company controlled by Marck Zuckerberg. It's safe to say that Facebook is very fond of Evan Spiegel's soon-to-list unicorn and social media darling, Snapchat. In August, Instagram copied Snapchats popular Stories feature.

Now, WhatsApp has gone ahead and done the same. Stories is essentially a feature wherein one can share photos, videos for up to 24 hours before they disappear altogether. Furthermore, WhatsApp has allowed people to add GIFs into their Stories. The format that Snapchat invented is now becoming universal.

Stories is essentially a feature wherein one can share photos, videos for up to 24 hours before they disappear altogether. Furthermore, WhatsApp has allowed people to add GIFs into their Stories. The format that Snapchat invented is now becoming universal.

WhatsApp on Monday, 20 February, unveiled a new version of its existing plain status update simply calling it WhatsApp Status to its 1.2 billion users. Previously, one could only share a short message like, "out to lunch" or "gone to the doctor's" or maybe even something philosophical. Who knows, at the rate, they are going, Facebook might just be next. In fact, Facebook's Messenger product was revamped in December, to make sending photos a the forefront. At least Facebook hasn't made the camera the first thing that people see when the app opens.

WhatsApp though does stand out from the crowd. It added the abilities to add GIFs to Status'. They've even gone and made sure that all status updates are end-to-end encrypted (disappear means disappear). Unlike Snapchat and Instagram, WhatsApp videos can be as long as 45 seconds - a welcome addition. Also, WhatsApp status' are shared only with those in your address book and not others.

This is a format that is being broadly adopted, and were adopting it as well, product manager at WhatsApp, Randall Sarafa, told Recode. There are some pretty interesting things that weve done to make it unique to WhatsApp. Remember, Facebook had offered Spiegel $3 billion to buy Snapchat back in 2013 but that offer was turned down.

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Facebook does it again. WhatsApp launches revamped Status, cloning Snapchat - Catch News

Good morning! This week were delving into longreads on the present and future of women, the groundwork for Trump, andcloning? Follow us down the rabbit hole, please drop your favourite reads of the week in comments, and stay tuned this week, because we have an exciting announcement coming up!

Some of the most astute predictions about the rise of Trump came not from leftist visionaries, but sharp conservative thinkers which is perhaps a sharp reminder that reading conservatives can provide valuable insight into preventable situations.

But unlike the old kind of populism that struck terror in the hearts of the Founding Fathers, the new populism, as Kristol dubbed it, was nothing to worry about. In his view, the sentiments of the people now represented a common sense reaction against the un-wisdom of the elites. What was needed, he believed, was a strong leader who could rally the masses to reclaim American democracy from the clutches of liberal intellectuals, institute a faith-based government, and bind the nation together by preaching an assertive nationalism.

Women militants are often dismissed, belittled, or treated as secondary to their male counterparts. Society rarely allows women to respond to oppression with violence, to consider violence as a rational and reasonable reaction, and Ensler challenges this notion through conversations with women fighters.

I have interviewed women guerillas in the mountains of the Philippines and the indigenous Lumads fighting back against the mining corporations stealing and poisoning their lands, women in US prisons involved in the Black Liberation movement in the US imprisoned for violent acts. It is clear in joining militant movements that women escaped traditional oppressive gender role assignments in every society. Every woman I spoke to talked about rage, rage and helplessness in the face of state power. For them, becoming an armed militant was a way of expressing political outrage and not being rolled over by the neoliberal, racist, capitalist patriarchy. It was a way of keeping dignity and fighting for their families and land and traditions and life itself. It was a way of surviving.

The social contract that governs our conduct is faded, disrupted, chaotic. What does that mean for the way we interact with each other, and the world? Can we reclaim an age of manners?

The social code remains unwritten, and it has always interested me how many problems this poses in the matter of ascertaining the truth. The truth often appears in the guise of a threat to the social code. It has this in common with rudeness. When people tell the truth, they can experience a feeling of release from pretense that is perhaps similar to the release of rudeness. It might follow that people can mistake truth for rudeness, and rudeness for truth. It may only be by examining the aftermath of each that it becomes possible to prove which was which.

The editorial team at Catapult are consistently developing some of my favourite longreads on a regular basis I stop by at least once a week for absolutely stunning work. This layered, complicated, lyrical piece about being a woman in a world that hates women is a superb read.

Now there is only one man in my office who will hold a conversation with me without looking self-conscious. We are at a happy hour after a work conference where we talk about being writers. The conversation means something to me; it is raining outside and the bar is crowded and loud and we have all come from the conference and I am happy to talk about the thing I love best. Then we talk about our office. It turns out that he knows the story already. It turns out everyone knows the story, just as I feared. Im so happy, I could kiss you right now. I drink. I drink so much that later I will have to walk past my car and keep walking. I ask, is it something, or is it nothing? He hates the boss, too. Everyone hates the boss, wants him out, wants this to be something.

I have a vivid memory of hearing a report about Dolly the sheep on Morning Edition and the series of conversations the earthshattering event sparked what would cloning mean for society? 20 years later, we still arent sure.

Instantly understandable to an excited Mrs WalkerI knew we had done what we had thought we had donethe fax had been kept terse and cryptic because the breakthrough was, at the time, hush-hush. The existence of Dolly the sheep would not be revealed to the world at large until the following February, when a scientific paper was published in Natureat which point a furore broke out that went far beyond the scientific world.

If you enjoy our work, please consider supporting us witha one time or recurring donation. We believe in paying writers, andwe rely on our readers to help us continue serving up interesting, dynamic, and engaging commentary every weekday. To make sure you dont miss any of that commentary, you can subscribe to our newsletter below and if youre interested in writing for us, check outour contributor guidelines.

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Must reads: Populism, sexism, cloning, and rudeness - GlobalComment.com

Cloning, to some a glimpse of the future, to others a step too far. There can be no doubt, however, that this technology will have important ramifications for your future, for illor good no one can yet tell. Cloned steaks are currently available on supermarket shelves but cloning is nothing new. Animals have been cloned since 1885 when Hans Adolf Edward Dreisch cloned a sea urchin. Cloning may well be the saving grace for many an endangered species. If you believe inconspiracy theorieshumans have either already been cloned. There can, however, be no doubt that this is inevitable in the not too distant future.

In the mean-time, we will happily be consuming cloned meat, which in the US doesnt require producers to label as such. Lets have a look at fifteen animals that have been successfully cloned. The following list is not exhaustive and merely a selection of interesting examples for your pleasure. Youre welcome.

An Asian carp was successfully cloned in 1963 and a mere decade later Tong Dizhou also cloned a European crucian carp. We often think of cloning as a modern development so excusing the 1885 example this is actually amazing.

Perhaps the most famous of all cloned animals, Dolly was created artificially in 1996. Dolly lived to the grand old age of six. She was the first cloned mammal and to this day is considered a great success. There have been many versions of Dolly since, which is a little perturbing. The author has fond memories of first hearing of this breakthrough during his formative teenage years.

This cheeky little rodent was cloned in Hawaii in 1997. Unsurprisingly, Cumulima was the first successfully cloned mouse. She lived until the ripe old age of two years and seven months. This was a great achievement for her creators. She produced two litters and was, ahem, later retired.

The Japanese were quite prolific during the 90s and their cloning program. These two cows were created in 1998 and have subsequently been duplicated several thousand times since. Noto and Kaga have paved the way for many other clones engineered to produce improved meat and milk products.

Another example of a cloned ruminant, Mira was cloned in 1998. Mira and her sisters were created in a US lab as predecessors of livestock engineering for the pharmaceutical industry.

This family of clones, if an accurate collective term for clones, were created for modification to allow for human cell and organ transplant. Millie and her copies were created in 2000 by a US based company.

Ombretta is a great example of cloning for the good. Before Ombretta, Mouflon were an endangered species until, of course, 2001 when this species was brought back from the brink of extinction. This was a great example of how surrogacy can help to produce a viable clone of endangered species. Thanks, Ombretta.

The lab monkey world received its first clone in 2000. US-based Tetra is the first in a series of cloned monkeys that scientists could use as test subjects to learn more about diseases like diabetes.

Guar what now? A Guar is an Asian ox that has been dwindling in numbers. Thankfully, they were succesfully cloned in 2001. Sadly, Noah lived for two days and died of dysentery soon after.

Copy Cat could well be the starting gun for an entirely new industry of pet clones. Created in 2001 Copy Cat, was, well, a domestic cat. Copy Cat was the worlds first cloned pet.

Given the never-ending game of cat and, ahem, rat it is only fair to include Ralph. Ralph was one, or is it legion, of three rat pups created in 2002. Ralphs genetic makeup may well be used in research labs in the future. 129 embryos were implanted into two female rats with three being viable rats. Ok, so not a legion of rats, but it sounded cool ok? Is is just me who believes that rats arent exactly in need of cloning technology?

Mules are sterile right? Not if you clone them! Well yes, they are still sterile but this is a great way of sticking your middle finger up to biological boundaries. Idaho Gem was born in 2003.

No, not Prometheus damn your devious mindunless, well actually yes if you can speak Greek, of course. An Italian team created this cloned horse in 2003. The belief was that they could mass produce Italian stallions. Sadly the experiment failed. She was birthed by her own clone source parent.

Being endangered is not a prerequisite of cloning potential. The African Wildcat was cloned for no other reason than we just can. US scientists used Ditteaux as a template for cloning other, more vulnerable animals.

Who doesnt like ferrets? Surely if any animal was worthy of replication its these furry, limbed bitty snake beasts? Ok, I might be a bit biased. Libby and Lilly were cloned in 2004. But why? As it turns out, ferrets are useful for the study of human respiratory diseases. They are still nasty bitty furry snake monsters, however. They also smell of pee.

Sources:businesspundit.com

[Featured Image Source: PublicDomainPictures via Pixabay]

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15 Animals That Have Been Successfully Cloned by Scientists - Interesting Engineering

February 16, 2017 This is not your parents' "Jurassic Park."

Harnessing the power of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool, a team of Harvard researchers is slowly coaxing woolly mammoth-like traits out of normal elephant cells. But recent claims that theyre close to creating a hybrid embryo have raised questions regarding the ethics of the procedure.

The issues range from questions of practicality Should we risk impregnating an endangered elephant with an experimental embryo? to an ethical Pandora's box: Would the ability to bring species back from the dead derail conservation efforts?

But geneticist George Church says he believes letting the research continue would produce the benefits that go beyond the chance to see an extinct creature, suggesting the reintroduction of the woolly mammoth might mitigate climate change.

Except it wouldn't be a mammoth, exactly.

"Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo, Dr. Church told the Guardian. Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits. Were not there yet, but it could happen in a couple of years.

The phrase mammoth cloning may conjure up images of scientists extracting amber-bound DNA and incubating it in frogs as in the 1993 film "Jurassic Park," but it means something quite different to Church.

Instead of re-creating an extinct organism, his team is trying to create a hybrid mammophant. Starting with the woolly mammoths closest living relative, the Asian elephant, Church uses theCRISPRprecision gene editing tool to snip and splice in mammoth genes, granting mammoth-like characteristics such as a shaggy coat, extra fat, and cold-resistant blood.

The list of edits affects things that contribute to the success of elephants in cold environments. We already know about ones to do with small ears, subcutaneous fat, hair, and blood, Church explained to New Scientist.

So far, with samples from a remarkably well-preserved 2013 find as a DNA guide, the team has accomplished 45 of these edits. If their goal were to perfectly re-create the mammoth genome, theyd still have thousands to go.

And they arent the only team taking this alternative cloning approach. Researchers in Chile are also trying to engineer a dinosaur out of a chicken by rolling back certain genes.

Church's team says theyre only a couple years away from the next step, making the edits in an elephant embryo and studying its viability. The researchers believe they could turn skin cells of the highly endangered Asian elephant into embryos using cloning techniques.

And thats the easy part.

Once they have a mammophant egg ready to go, theyd need a way to carry it to term. Ethics prevent using real Asian elephants as surrogate mothers because of their endangered status and high degree of intelligence, but Church has other plans.

"We hope to do the entire procedure ex-vivo," oroutside a living body, he told The Guardian. "It would be unreasonable to put female reproduction at risk in an endangered species."

Some say the technology to grow a hybrid animal inside an artificial womb wont be possible this decade, but The Guardian reports that Churchs lab is hard at work on the problem, already able to incubate a mouse embryo for ten days, about half of its gestation period.

Even if Church succeeds in overcoming all the technical hurdles, some wonder if the mammoth should be resurrected at all.

As Matthew Cobb, professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, told The Guardian: The proposed de-extinction of mammoths raises a massive ethical issue the mammoth was not simply a set of genes, it was a social animal, as is the modern Asian elephant. What will happen when the elephant-mammoth hybrid is born? How will it be greeted by elephants?

Church argues that the mammophant would join the fight against global warming, thus bringing concrete benefits to humans all over the planet.

They keep the tundra from thawing by punching through snow and allowing cold air to come in, said Church. In the summer they knock down trees and help the grass grow.

While such behavior could help keep greenhouses gasses locked in the permafrost, wed need to get pretty good at mammophant cloning to bring back enough of the beasts to populate Canada and Siberia. Plus, as is often the case with geoengineering schemes, the effects would be uncertain. Scientists arent even sure whether the original loss of mammoths caused some climate change, or if the climate change killed the mammoths. In addition, there's no guarantee that the helpful stomping behaviors are genetic, instead of taught by long-vanished mammoth parents.

And climate may not be the only unintended consequence. Other researchers worry developing such Lazarus-technology would endanger current conservation efforts. "De-extinction just provides the ultimate 'out'," said wildlife biologist Stanley Temple in a BBC interview. "If you can always bring the species back later, it undermines the urgency about preventing extinctions."

Rather, we should focus on keeping the Asian elephant alive, paleobiologist and mammoth expert Tori Herridge wrote in a 2014 opinion piece for The Guardian.

Sometimes the ice age world is so real to me that my throat aches and my eyes sting a little when I think about what weve lost, the animals we will never see," she wrote. "But heres the irony if we feel like that about the mammoth, just think how our kids might feel about the elephant if we let it become extinct. We really ought to be focusing on that, and doing everything we can to stop it from happening.

Continued here:

Scientists say we can clone a woolly mammoth. But should we? - Christian Science Monitor

Well hello, Dolly.

Its been 20 years since scientists in Scotland told the world about Dolly the sheep, the first mammal successfully cloned from an adult body cell. What was special about Dolly is that her parents were actually a single cell originating from mammary tissue of an adult ewe. Dolly was an exact genetic copy of that sheep a clone.

Dolly captured peoples imaginations, but those of us in the field had seen her coming through previous research. Ive been working with mammalian embryos for over 40 years, with some work in my lab specifically focusing on various methods of cloning cattle and other livestock species. In fact, one of the coauthors of the paper announcing Dolly worked in our laboratory for three years prior to going to Scotland to help create the famous clone.

Dolly was an important milestone, inspiring scientists to continue improving cloning technology as well as to pursue new concepts in stem cell research. The endgame was never meant to be armies of genetically identical livestock: Rather, researchers continue to refine the techniques and combine them with other methods to turbocharge traditional animal breeding methods as well as gain insights into aging and disease.

Dolly was a perfectly normal sheep who became the mother of numerous normal lambs. She lived to six and a half years, when she was eventually put down after a contagious disease spread through her flock, infecting cloned and normally reproduced sheep alike. Her life wasnt unusual; its her origin that made her unique.

Before the decades of experiments that led to Dolly, it was thought that normal animals could be produced only by fertilization of an egg by a sperm. Thats how things naturally work. These germ cells are the only ones in the body that have their genetic material all jumbled up and in half the quantity of every other kind of cell. That way when these so-called haploid cells come together at fertilization, they produce one cell with the full complement of DNA. Joined together, the cell is termed diploid, for twice, or double. Two halves make a whole.

From that moment forward, nearly all cells in that body have the same genetic makeup. When the one-cell embryo duplicates its genetic material, both cells of the now two-cell embryo are genetically identical. When they in turn duplicate their genetic material, each cell at the four-cell stage is genetically identical. This pattern goes on so that each of the trillions of cells in an adult is genetically exactly the same whether its in a lung or a bone or the blood.

In contrast, Dolly was produced by whats called somatic cell nuclear transfer. In this process, researchers remove the genetic material from an egg and replace it with the nucleus of some other body cell. The resulting egg becomes a factory to produce an embryo that develops into an offspring. No sperm is in the picture; instead of half the genetic material coming from a sperm and half from an egg, it all comes from a single cell. Its diploid from the start.

Dolly was the culmination of hundreds of cloning experiments that, for example, showed diploid embryonic and fetal cells could be parents of offspring. But there was no way to easily know all the characteristics of the animal that would result from a cloned embryo or fetus. Researchers could freeze a few of the cells of a 16-cell embryo, while going on to produce clones from the other cells; if a desirable animal was produced, they could thaw the frozen cells and make more copies. But this was impractical because of low success rates.

Dolly demonstrated that adult somatic cells also could be used as parents. Thus, one could know the characteristics of the animal being cloned.

By my calculations, Dolly was the single success from 277 tries at somatic cell nuclear transfer. Sometimes the process of cloning by somatic cell nuclear transfer still produces abnormal embryos, most of which die. But the process has greatly improved so success rates now are more like 10 percent; its highly variable, though, depending on the cell type used and the species.

More than 10 different cell types have been used successfully as parents for cloning. These days most cloning is done using cells obtained by biopsying skin.

Genetics is only part of the story. Even while clones are genetically identical, their phenotypes the characteristics they express will be different. Its like naturally occurring identical twins: They share all their genes but theyre not really exactly alike, especially if reared in different settings.

Environment plays a huge role for some characteristics. Food availability can influence weight. Diseases can stunt growth. These kinds of lifestyle, nutrition or disease effects can influence which genes are turned on or off in an individual; these are called epigenetic effects. Even though all the genetic material may be the same in two identical clones, they might not be expressing all the same genes.

Consider the practice of cloning winning racehorses. Clones of winners sometimes also will be winners but most of the time theyre not. This is because winners are outliers; they need to have the right genetics, but also the right epigenetics and the right environment to reach that winning potential. For example, one can never exactly duplicate the uterine conditions a winning racehorse experienced when it was a developing fetus. Thus, cloning champions usually leads to disappointment. On the other hand, cloning a stallion that sires a high proportion of race-winning horses will result very reliably in a clone that similarly sires winners. This is a genetic rather than a phenotypic situation.

Even though the genetics are reliable, there are aspects of the cloning procedure that mean the epigenetics and environment are suboptimal. For example, sperm have elegant ways of activating the eggs they fertilize, which will die unless activated properly; with cloning, activation usually is accomplished by a strong electric shock. Many of the steps of cloning and subsequent embryonic development are done in test tubes in incubators. These conditions are not perfect substitutes for the female reproductive tract where fertilization and early embryonic development normally occur.

Sometimes abnormal fetuses develop to term, resulting in abnormalities at birth. The most striking abnormal phenotype of some clones is termed large offspring syndrome, in which calves or lambs are 30 or 40 percent larger than normal, resulting in difficult birth. The problems stem from an abnormal placenta. At birth, these clones are genetically normal, but are overly large, and tend to be hyperinsulinemic and hypoglycemic. (The conditions normalize over time once the offspring is no longer influenced by the abnormal placenta.)

Recent improvements in cloning procedures have greatly reduced these abnormalities, which also occur with natural reproduction, but at a much lower incidence.

Many thousands of cloned mammals have been produced in nearly two dozen species. Very few of these concern practical applications, such as cloning a famous Angus bull named Final Answer (who recently died at an old age) in order to produce more high-quality cattle via his clones sperm.

But the cloning research landscape is changing fast. The driving force for producing Dolly was not to produce genetically identical animals. Rather researchers want to combine cloning techniques with other methods in order to efficiently change animals genetically much quicker than traditional animal breeding methods that take decades to make changes in populations of species such as cattle.

One recent example is introducing the polled (no horns) gene into dairy cattle, thus eliminating the need for the painful process of dehorning. An even more striking application has been to produce a strain of pigs that is incapable of being infected by the very contagious and debilitating PRRS virus. Researchers have even made cattle that cannot develop Mad Cow Disease. For each of these procedures, somatic cell nuclear transplantation is an essential part of the process.

To date, the most valuable contribution of these somatic cell nuclear transplantation experiments has been the scientific information and insights gained. Theyve enhanced our understanding of normal and abnormal embryonic development, including aspects of aging, and more. This information is already helping reduce birth defects, improve methods of circumventing infertility, develop tools to fight certain cancers and even decrease some of the negative consequences of aging in livestock and even in people. Two decades since Dolly, important applications are still evolving.

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20 years after Dolly: Everything you always wanted to know about the cloned sheep and what came next - The Conversation US

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A group of Harvard researchers have announced that they are close to resurrecting the woolly mammoth. The researchers believe they are less than two years away from creating a functioning embryo, although creating a fully-grown mammoth would take much longer.

Bringing back an extinct animal is not easy. The mammoth is an ideal candidate to become the first resurrected species, both because of the large amount of intact mammoth specimens available, and also because its close living relatives, the elephants, still walk the Earth. Still, there is considerable debate around just how to bring the mammoth back to life.

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The primary issue is the lack of suitable genetic material for cloning. While a significant amount of mammoth tissue has been found, most of the DNA has been destroyed after being frozen for so long. A team of South Korean researchers are hoping to find enough DNA to clone a mammoth, but the Harvard group is taking a different approach.

The Harvard team is genetically modifying an elephant genome, replacing some elephant genes with mammoth ones. Essentially, they're trying to manually rebuild the mammoth genome. The final product won't be exactly the same as the extinct version, but it'll look pretty much identical.

The Harvard researchers ultimately want to implant their engineered genome inside an elephant embryo, which they expect will happen sometime in the next two years. Once that occurs, they will try to bring the embryo to term using an artificial womb. However, such a feat may not be possible for several more years, so it might be a while before you can see a live woolly mammothor a theme park full of them.

Source: The Guardian

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Scientists Are Close to Cloning a Woolly Mammoth - Popular Mechanics

February 15, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Google has proven time and again it is on the extreme bleeding edge of invention when it comes to scale out architectures that make supercomputers look like toys. But what would the world look like if the search engine giant had started selling capacity on its vast infrastructure back in 2005, before Amazon Web Services launched, and then shortly thereafter started selling capacity on its high level platform services? And what if it had open sourced these technologies, as it has done with the Kubernetes container controller?

The world would be surely different, and the reason it is not is because there is a lesson to be learned, one that applies equally well to traditional HPC systems for simulation and modeling as well as the Web application, analytics, and transactional systems forged by hyperscalers and cloud builders. And the lesson is this: Making a tool or system that was created for a specific task more general purpose and enterprise-grade meaning mere mortals, not just Site Reliability Engineers at hyperscalers can make it work and keep it working is very, very hard. And just because something scales up and out does not mean that it scales down, as it needs to do be appropriate for enterprises.

That, in a nutshell, is why it has taken nearly ten years since Google first started development of Spanner and five years from when Google released its paper on this globe-spanning, distributed SQL database to when it is available as a service on Googles Cloud Platform public cloud, aimed at more generic workloads than its own AdWords and Google Play.

If this was easy, Google would have long since done it or someone else cloning Googles ideas would have, and thus relational databases that provide high availability, horizontal scalability, and transactional consistency on a vast scale would be normal. They are not, and that is why the availability of Spanner on Cloud Platform is a big deal.

It would have been bigger news if Google had open sourced Spanner or some tool derived from Spanner, much as it has done with the guts of its Borg cluster and container controller through the Kubernetes project, and that may yet happen as Cockroach Labs, the New York City startup that is cloning Spanner much as Yahoo did with Googles MapReduce to create Hadoop or the HBase and Cassandra NoSQL databases that were derived from ideas in Googles BigTable NoSQL database.

To put it bluntly, it would have been more interesting to see Google endorse CockroachDB and support it on Cloud Platform, creating an open source community as well as a cloud service for its Cloud Platform customers. But, as far as we know, it did not do that. (We will catch up with the Cockroach Labs folks, who all came from Google, to see what they think about all this.) And we think that the groundswell of support for Kubernetes, which Google open sourced and let go, is a great example of how to build a community with momentum very fast.

For all we know, Google will eventually embrace CockroachDB as a service on Cloud Platform not just for external customers but for internal Google workloads as well, much as is starting to happen with Kubernetes jobs running on Cloud Platform through the Container Engine service among Googlers.

Back in 2007, Google was frustrated by the limitations of its Megastore NoSQL and BigTable NoSQL databases, which were fine in that they provided horizontal scalability and reasonably fast performance, but Google wanted to also have these data services be more like traditional relational databases and also have them be geographically distributed for high availability and for maximum throughput on a set of global applications that also ran geographically. And so it embarked on a means to take BigTable, which had been created back in 2004 to house data stored for Googles eponymous search engines as well as Gmail and other servers, and allow it to span global distances and still be usable as a single database for Googles developers, who could care less about how a database or datastore is architected and implemented so long as it gets closer and closer to the SQL-based relational database that is the foundation of enterprise computing.

And, by the way, a pairing of relational data models and database schemas with the SQL query language that was invented by IBM nearly forty years ago and cloned by Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and anyone else you can think of including Postgres and MySQL. Moreover, IBM has been running clustered databases on its mainframes for as long as we can remember they are called Parallel Sysplexes and they can be locally clustered as well as geographically distributed and run a cluster of DB2 database instances as if there were one giant, logical database. Just like Spanner. Google databases like Spanner may dwarf those that can be implemented on IBM mainframes, but Google was not the first company to come up with this stuff. Contrary to what Silicon Valley may believe.

With any relational database, the big problem when many users (be they people or applications) is deciding who has access to the data and who can change that data as they are sharing the database. There are very sophisticated timestamping and locking mechanisms for deciding who has the right to change data and what that data is these are the so-called ACID properties of databases. Google luminary Eric Brewer, who is vice president of infrastructure at Google and who helped create many of the data services at the search engine giant, coined the CAP Theorem back in 1998 and the ideas were developed by the database community in the following years. The gist of CAP Theorem is that all distributed databases have to worry about three things consistency, availability, and partition tolerance and no matter what you do, you can only have no more than two of these properties being fully implemented at any time in the datastore or database. Brewer explained this theorem in some detail in a blog post related to the Cloud Spanner service Google has just launched, and also explained that the theory is about having 100 percent of two of these properties, and that in the real world, as with NoSQL and NewSQL databases, the real issue is how you can get close enough to 100 percent on all three to have a workable, usable database that is reliable enough to run enterprise applications.

With Spanner, after a decade of work, Google has been able to achieve this. (You can read all about Spanner in the paper that Google release back in October 2012.) Part of the reason why Google can do this is because it has developed a sophisticated timestamping scheme for the globally distributed parts of Spanner that creates a kind of universal and internally consistent time that is synchronized by Googles own network and is not dependent on outside services like the Network Time Protocol (NTP) that is used by servers to keep relatively in synch. Google needed a finer-grained control of timestamping with Spanner, so it came up with a scheme based on atomic clocks and GPS receivers in its datacenters that could provide a kind of superclock that spanned all of its datacenters, ordering transactions across the distributed systems. This feature, called TrueTime by Google, is neat, but the real thing that makes Googles Spanner work at the speed and scale that it does is the internal Google network that lashes those datacenters to the same heartbeat of time as it passes.

Brewer said as much in a white paper that was published about Spanner and TrueTime in conjunction with the Cloud Spanner service this week.

Many assume that Spanner somehow gets around CAP via its use of TrueTime, which is a service that enables the use of globally synchronized clocks. Although remarkable, TrueTime does not significantly help achieve CA; its actual value is covered below. To the extent there is anything special, it is really Googles wide-area network, plus many years of operational improvements, that greatly limit partitions in practice, and thus enable high availability.

The CA here refers to Consistency and Availability, and these are possible because Google has a very high throughput, global fiber optic network linking its datacenters with at least three links between the datacenters and the network backbone, called B1. This means that Spanner partitions that are being written to and that are trying to replicate data to other Spanner partitions running around the Google facilities have many paths to reach each other and eventually get all of the data synchronized eventually being a matter of tens of milliseconds, not tens of nanoseconds like a port to port hop on a very fast switch and not hundreds of milliseconds, which is the time it takes for a human being to see an application moving too slow.

The important thing about Spanner is that it is a database with SQL semantics that allows reads without any locking of the database and massive scalability on local Spanner slices to thousands (and we would guess tens of thousands) of server nodes, with very fast replication on a global scale to many difference Spanner slices. When we pressed Google about the local and global scalability limits on the Cloud Spanner service, a Google spokesperson said: Technically speaking, there are no limits to Cloud Spanners scale.

Ahem. If we had a dollar for every time someone told us that. . . . What we know from the original paper is that Spanner was designed to, in theory, scale across millions of machines across hundreds of datacenters and juggle trillions of rows of data in its database. What Google has done in practice, that is another thing.

We also asked how many geographically distributed copies of the database are provided through the Cloud Spanner service, and this was the reply: Everything is handled automatically, but customers have full view into where their data is located via our UI/menu.

We will seek to get better answers to these and other questions.

The other neat thing about the paper that Brewer released this week is that it provided some availability data for Spanner as it is running inside of Google, and this chart counts incidents unexpected things that happened rather than failures times when Spanner was unavailable itself. Incidents can cause failures, but not always, and Google claims that Spanner is available more than 99.999 percent (so called 5 9s) of the time.

As you can see from the chart above, the most frequent cause of incidents relating to Spanner running internally were user errors, such as overloading the system or not configuring something correctly; in this case, only that user is affected and everyone else using Spanner is woefully unaware of the issue. (Not my circus, not my monkeys. . . .) The cluster incidents, which made up 12.1 percent of Spanner incidents, were when servers or datacenter power or other components crashed, and often a Site Reliability Engineer is needed to fix something here. The operator incidents are when SREs do something wrong, and yes, that happens. The bugs, which are true software errors, presumably in Spanner code as well as applications, and Brewer said that the two biggest outages (meaning the time and impact) were related to such software errors. Networking errors for Spanner are when the network goes kaplooey, and it usually caused datacenters or regions with Spanner nodes to be cut off from the rest of the Spanner cluster. To be a CA system in the CAP Theorem categorization, the A has to be pretty good and not caused by the network partitions being an issue.

With under 8 percent of Spanner failures being due to network and partition issues and with north of 5 9s availability, you can make a pretty good argument that Spanner and therefore the Cloud Spanner service being a pretty good fuzzy CAP database, not just hewing to the CP definition that both Spanner and CockroachDB technically fall under.

The inside Spanner at Google underlies hundreds of its applications and petabytes of capacity and churns through tens of millions of queries per second, and it is obviously battle tested enough for Google to trust other applications on it besides its own.

At the moment, Cloud Spanner is only available as a beta service to Cloud Platform customers, and Google is not talking about a timeline for when it will be generally available, but we expect a lot more detail at the Next 17 conference in early March that Google is hosting. What we know for sure is that Google is aiming Cloud Spanner at customers who are, like it was a decade ago, frustrated by MySQL databases that are chopped up into shards, as Google was using at the time as its relational datastore, as well as those who have chosen the Postgres path once Oracle bought MySQL. The important thing is that Spanner and now Cloud Spanner support distributed transactions, schemas, and DDL statements as well as SQL queries and JDBC drivers that are commonly used in the enterprise to tickle databases. Cloud Spanner has libraries for the popular languages out there, including Java, Node.js, Go, and Python.

As is the case with any cloud data service out there, putting data in is free, but moving it around different regions is not and neither would be downloading it off Cloud Platform to another service or a private datacenter, should that be necessary.

Categories: Cloud, Hyperscale, Store

Tags: BigTable, Cloud Platform, Cloud Spanner, Google, Megastore, Spanner

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Cloning a drive comes in handy for a variety of reasons, but primarily when you want to replace one drive on a PC with another that is either bigger or faster than the original drive, if not both.

Such a cloning operation becomes critical on Windows PCs when the drive to be replaced is the boot/system drive, meaning it contains the files used to boot up the machine when it's starting up or restarting, as well the operating system files used to run Windows itself. Its critical because its proper outcome is a machine that boots and runs when that operation is complete, the old drive removed, and the new drive put in its place.

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By definition, disk cloning means creating a true and faithful copy of one computer storage device onto another. The name comes from a time when this meant a spinning hard disk of some kind. But today, with solid-state disks (SSDs) as common as hard disks (HDs), this can mean copying the contents of one storage device onto another storage device, where both source and target can be either an HD or an SSD. In fact, it's still often the case that the source is an HD and the target an SSD when a boot/system disk is the focus for cloning, because of the improved performance that such a changeover invariably delivers.

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Drive cloning in Windows 10 with free tools - Computerworld