ADVS researchers are seeing double
What if you could slice off a succulent piece of prime steak, clone a bull from it, then produce a plethora of delicious dinners?
At USU, researchers are able to do just that — kind of.
Nuclear transfer research — or cloning — happens all the time in the Biotechnology Center, said Dr. Irina Polejaeva, one of the leading researchers and members of the team that cloned the first pigs. USU is one of the most highly recognized universities in the nation for its cloning research, she added.
“When I first moved from Russia, I moved to Logan in 1993,” Polejaeva said. “I moved away in 1996, but I came back six months ago, because the cloning work that is going on here is very exciting.”
Before working at USU, Polejaeva worked for PPL Therapeutics, the biotechnology group behind the first cloned mammal: Dolly the sheep.
Since Dolly was cloned in 1996, there have been more than 20 species of animals cloned, Polejaeva said. She said researchers have cloned cattle, sheep, pigs, horses, mules, mice, cats, dogs, deer and even water buffalo.
Ken White, the department head of animal, dairy and veterinary sciences, said he was the first person to ever clone an equine, a member of the horse family. White said he also cloned three genetically identical mules from one original.
“I first became involved here because USU’s lab was internationally recognized,” White said.
Currently, the research team is working on cloning goats, which has never been done at USU, Polejaeva said.
Cloning basics
Simply put, Polejaeva said, cloning is the ability to produce an animal genetically identical to another. What most people do not know is that the DNA used does not have to be reproductive DNA. A clone could be made from a flake of skin or a pork chop, she said.
“One interesting thing we have learned is that an unfertilized egg has a unique cellular environment,” White said. “This environment causes the de-differentiation of DNA. We don’t entirely understand it. It’s one of the great mysteries and excitements.”
If DNA is extracted from any part of the body — skin for example — and injected into an egg, the DNA, which has been shut off to allow the cell to specialize as a skin cell, is turned back on, turning the skin cell into an undifferentiated stem cell, White said.
“We take eggs from horses, take the genetic material out and put DNA in from the animal we want to clone,” Polejaeva said. “Then we allow the embryo to grow for the first couple of days in an incubator, before placing it into a surrogate mother.”
When creating cloned animals, the team does not always use completely normal DNA, but can put in transgenic DNA, which means the DNA contains genes from another species, Polejaeva said.
The altered clones produced can be incredibly important for research, Polejaeva said. For example, in 1999, Louisiana State University cloned Millie, a goat whose milk contained a drug used in coronary bypass surgery.
However, the cloning process is far from perfect, White said.
“Ninety percent of pregnancies do not go to term,” he said. “That’s extremely inefficient — much worse than regular births.”
One of the problems the USU research team is working on is how to keep the cloned embryos from being rejected by the surrogate mother’s immune system and miscarrying, White said.
The controversy
Embryo rejection isn’t the only problem the research team has faced. Harassment has been a hurdle as well, White said.
“When the first mule was cloned at USU, my name went unlisted. I took the name off my office door and off the university directory, and I still received some pretty crass emails,” he said. “There are certain groups of people that think all animal research is bad Other people get fairly angry when you say the word ‘stem cell,’ but when they learn what’s really going on, many of them are supportive.”
“My opinion is that, in regards to animals, cloning is fine,” said Jade Burt, a USU freshman statistics major. “A lot of good comes from it. Human cloning raises enough ethical concerns that I’m against it.”
White said most people are like Burt — when they learn the incredible potential behind cloning research, the vast majority of people are non-militant.
Cloning potential
White and Polejaeva agreed, there is great potential behind cloning research.
“Cloning can be used for producing endangered species,” Polejaeva said. “As well as cloning expensive prize animals.”
The medical applications have great potential, too, White said. The technology can be used to make models for heart disease or cystic fibrosis, by producing transgenic animals to test on. The de-differentiation nature of egg cells is useful, he said.
“For example,” White said, “if one of your lungs was destroyed, you could take a piece of lung, duplicate human egg conditions and then the piece of lung would become a stem cell. If you inserted the stem cell you created into the body, it could differentiate into a new lung.”
The agricultural potential of cloning is also vast, White said, because most male farm animals are castrated during infancy.
“You could have a gelding (a castrated stallion) that might be the fastest horse in the world,” White said. “It is impossible for you to continue the genetics of that animal, but with cloning you could create a stallion that would be incredible breeding stock.”
Cloning is also important for beef production, he said.
“I am willing to bet you have never had a real prime steak,” White said. “Because most of real prime beef is only in extremely expensive steakhouses on the east coast, but with cloning, you could take a piece of that prime steak and create an animal from it. The bull you created would make perfect breeding stock.”
For now, a lot of the cloning technology is only in the speculative stage, but the market is expanding daily, Polejaeva said. There are more than 700 cloned animals currently in the United States, she said.
“However, it needs to be much cheaper in order to be commercially viable,” Polejaeva said.
Cloning is a big deal, she added. If developed and made commercially viable, it could potentially change the world, she said.
– evan.millsap@aggiemail.usu.edu