Garima-II, the cloned buffalo was born on August 22nd, 2010. She survived without any complications and delivered a calf at 1.51am yesterday. The baby buffalo is called Mahima. She weighs 32 kg. Mahima is in very good health. She started sucking milk within 30 minutes of her birth. Thanks Garima-II for giving birth to a healthy baby buffalo. Hello Mahima, the little sweetiepie baby, welcome to Earth! Long live both of you!
The scientists working for National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI) produced the world’s first cloned buffalo through ‘advanced hand-guided cloning technique’. First clone died 6 days after birth. The second clone was alive for 2 years. The third clone is Garima-II, the proud mother.
Do you want to know about the Hand-guided cloning technique that was used to produced cloned animals?
Hand-guided cloning technique is an advanced modification of the conventional cloning technique that requires expensive micromanipulator machines. In this technique, immature oocytes are isolated from ovaries and are matured in-vitro. These are then denuded, treated with an enzyme to digest the outer covering called ‘zona pellucida’ and then treated with chemicals to push their genetic material to one side. This side is then cut off with the help of a hand-held fine microblade to remove the genetic material. The enucleated oocyte is then electrofused with a somatic cell taken from any source. The resulting embryos are cultured and grown in the laboratory for about seven days to develop them to the blastocyst stage. The embryos are then transferred to recipient buffaloes for producing cloned offspring.
Ain’t it cool?
Amazing! Q- would it ever be feasible to clone rare or endangered species to get their numbers up, or would the lack of biodiversity be too much of a problem? I’m not very knowledgeable about biology.
IIRC, when they cloned Dolly she had shorter telomeres due to being cloned from a 6 year old sheep.
I wonder what the state of the cloned mother’s telomeres were and, assuming that they were shorter at birth than uncloned individuals, what the state of her offspring’s telomere are.
Are they as long as telomeres of a baby Buffalo born of two uncloned individuals? Is there a difference between each chromosome’s telomere’s length depending on whether it came from a cloned parent or an uncloned parent?
To smrnda:
The lack of biodiversity also occurs in various domesticated animals due to the use of a few inseminators. the difference with humans is that most human do not have a moral compunction in culling the herd of any offspring suffering from the result of lack of biodiversity.
In an endangered species natural selection would perform the same function.
A bigger problem could be if their environment changes as they would have less biodiversity to adapt. I say could because of the founder effect.
But the biggest problem is that just cloning more individuals from an endangered species would not be enough if the species is endangered due to habitat destruction (whether due to human activity or not), you would have to find or engineer a suitable habitat for them to thrive first.
Note that I am not a biologist and that is only my lay understanding so I could be completely wrong.
In my previous post I don’t mean to imply that the founder effect causes a lack of biodiversity to be a good thing, more that it shows that a species can survive (even if it might change enough as compared to the original species to be classified as a new species) even with a population/genetic bottleneck.
it means cloning technology can become a landmark in the treatment of cancer and other diseases too. huge medical expenditure will be, though, a big hurdle .
Now where did I put those wooly mammoth somatic cells? I’m hungry.
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