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IPFS News Link • Science, Medicine and Technology

Dolly the Sheep Clones Are Ageing Just Fine

• motherboard.vice.com

An article today in the scientific journal Nature Communications lays out findings by biologist Kevin Sinclair and his team. They found that adult sheep clones Debbie, Denise, Diana, and Daisy—all created from the same cell line as the original clone, Dolly—are just as healthy as any normal sheep their age.

Twenty years after Dolly became the first mammal ever to be cloned, this is the first research aimed at investigating healthy ageing in clones made by somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT.

Still a relatively inefficient technology, SCNT is performed by taking the nucleus from an adult cell (such as a mammary gland, as with Dolly and her clones) and swapping it with the nucleus of a donated egg cell. Then, the embryo is implanted in a surrogate, which will give birth to the clone.


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