Cloning is a reality of our time; similar scientific activities are carried out all over the world; most often, pets are cloned. For example, to date, ViaGen Pets has produced more than a thousand completely healthy individuals of various species. However, although the cloned animals are raised in the United States, the company ships cloned pets to other countries.
ViaGen Pets is a leader in the global cloning services market. She specializes in cloning livestock, cats, dogs and horses, and preserving DNA. The company’s history dates back to 1998, when John Sperling, a true visionary of his time, together with Texas A & M University funded a project to clone his beloved dog named Missy. To do this, they created the company Genetic Savings and Clone, which was then renamed ViaGen Pets in 2002 as a result of a merger with Genomic FX. At first, the company only offered cloning services for livestock, but starting in 2016, it began cloning cats and dogs.
In January 2023, China presented its first cloned horse for racing, the foal Zhuang Zhuang is already 7 months old, and the color of his coat almost completely repeats the color of his original, the sports stallion Ursus, a RIA Novosti correspondent reports. According to the SinoGene company, in whose laboratory the clone was created, work on cloning the half-bred horse began in 2021. The cloned foal, named Zhuang Zhuang (translated from Chinese as “Strong”), was born on June 16, 2022.
The somatic cells were taken from a skin sample from a warm-blooded horse named Ursus, who came to China in 2007 from Germany and won numerous awards in equestrian competitions both in China and in other countries. The surrogate mother was a mare from the northwestern Chinese province of Gansu. Zhuang Zhuang’s coat is the same black as Ursus’s, the two horses differ only slightly in the color of the muzzle and limbs.
A group of scientists at Nankai University in China in July 2022 published a method for cloning pigs, which involves only a robot; the first seven piglets have already been born, according to a press release published on the university’s website.
The institute reported that a female common pig, which underwent a fertilization process, at each stage of which a robot participated, gave birth to seven Landrace piglets at the end of March. “Every step of the cloning process was automated and no human was involved in any of the cloning operations,” said Liu Yaowei, one of the research team members, as quoted by the South China Morning Post.
In 2018, molecular biologists from China used the technique used to clone Dolly and, for the first time, grew two full copies of the same monkey.
The black-footed ferret has been successfully cloned in the United States for the first time. Researchers hope this will save the endangered species. What other animals were born thanks to the achievements of scientists.
African greyhound puppy Snuppy was the world’s first cloned dog. He was born in South Korea in 2005. In 2008, Snoopy took part in the first known successful breeding of clone dogs, producing ten puppies. In 2012, Indian scientists managed to create a clone of the rare Himalayan goat, a breed characterized by silky hair. The female born on March 9 was named Nuri. In South Korea, in the mid-2000s, cats were bred with altered genes responsible for the production of fluorescent protein. True, the manipulations led to the fact that under the influence of ultraviolet light the animals glowed red. In 2003, the first cloned horse, Promethea, was born in a reproductive technology laboratory in Italy. Scientists made more than 300 attempts before they were able to grow a clone. In 2005, South Korean scientists cloned two she-wolves of an endangered species. In 2010, the first cloned Spanish fighting bull was born. In the United States, a service shepherd named Tracker was cloned, which saved people during the tragedy of September 11, 2001 and found the last surviving person under nine meters of rubble of one of the twin towers.