Like any good mother cow, she scampered around the pen, doing her best to stay between her calf and curious visitors. The odd thing was that the "mother" was a black-and-white Holstein, but her calf was a stocky, reddish-brown Texas Longhorn.
The scene was a converted farm in Lancaster County, where Cyagra Inc. has one of the few commercial operations in the United States cloning barnyard animals. Missy, the Texas Longhorn, was a copy - a clone - of a prized member of a New Mexico herd who died young. She was implanted as 7-day-old embryo in the Holstein, known as #97.
For now, Cyagra's cloning business is limited to such animals not raised for food, but that could change this year.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a draft report Dec. 28 saying that "meat and milk from clones of adult cattle, pigs and goats, and their offspring, are as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals."
That FDA report - which also kept in place a voluntary moratorium on the use of cloned animals for food - set the stage for a new round of debate about agricultural technologies that are declared safe by regulators, but make consumers nervous.
Even as genetically modified crops advance rapidly across America's fields, skepticism and outright rejections from retailers and food companies could keep cloning's business prospects in check....
Whole article: "www.checkbiotech.org":[ http://www.checkbiotech.org/root/index.cfm?fuseaction=news&doc_id=14514&start=1&control=195&page_start=1&page_nr=101&pg=1]
Cloning of prawns Boon for Indian export sector -
A Centrally-aided research project of the Calicut University Zoology department has made a path-breaking feat in the field of genetic engineering and cloning, which can have a tremendous impact in the export of prawns, the country’s major source of foreign exchange (23.2.2007)
Full benefits of animal cloning a good 50 years away -
Speaking on the 10th anniversary of the birth of Dolly, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, Ian Wilmut also said Britain had failed to exploit the landmark work, letting the United States and Japan take the lead on animal cloning (13.7.2006)
Sequencing genomes from single cells by polymerase cloning -
Genome sequencing currently requires DNA from pools of numerous nearly identical cells (clones), leaving the genome sequences of many difficult-to-culture microorganisms unattainable (22.6.2006)
Cloning, Biochemical Properties, and Distribution of Mycobacterial Haloalkane Dehalogenases -
Haloalkane dehalogenases are enzymes that catalyze the cleavage of the carbon-halogen bond by a hydrolytic mechanism (16.5.2006)
Design and cloning strategies for constructing shRNA expression vectors. -
Short hairpin RNA (shRNA) encoded within an expression vector has proven an effective means of harnessing the RNA interference (RNAi) pathway in mammalian cells (30.3.2006)
