Knoxville — University of Tennessee researchers have successfully cloned a calf in a procedure that simplifies the patented process used to produce the world’s first clone, the sheep Dolly.
Drs. Lannett Edwards and Neal Schrick, researchers at the UT Institute of Agriculture, announced the birth of Millennium, a Jersey calf cloned from a cell of an adult cow in the UT dairy herd.
The calf, “Millie” for short, is the third cow cloned in the United States from adult somatic cells, the researchers said. Millie was produced using standard cell-culturing techniques instead of the specialized techniques used to produce Dolly.
“We introduced the nucleus of a somatic cell into an egg from which we had previously removed all nuclear material,” Edwards said. “The result was a one-cell cloned embryo with the same DNA as the cow that donated the somatic cell. What is exciting is that we did not have to induce the somatic cell into a ‘quiet’ state before using it for cloning.”
Millie was born Aug. 23 weighing 62 pounds. As she grows up, the clone will be added to the UT herd and her health and milk-production records will be closely compared to those of the cow from whose cells she was cloned.