Cloning Goats


Montreal Company Produces Triplet Goat Clones

April 28, 1999 - Toronto - CP

Montreal scientists have cloned triplet goats in what is believed to be a world first. The goats -- Danny, Clint and Arnold -- are a month old and living on a farm west of Montreal run by Nexia Biotechnologies Inc., the company announced today. The goats were produced using nuclear transfer, a technique similar to the one used to produce Dolly the sheep, the first cloned animal. Dolly, born in early 1997 in Scotland, originated from a cell extracted from an adult sheep, making her a replica of a sheep six years older. Work to produce the identical goats started eight months ago, said Jeffrey Turner, Nexia's president and a former genetics professor at McGill University.

The goats originated from cells transferred from the body of one goat into another goat's mature fertilized eggs. The eggs had their original nuclei, or DNA, removed and replaced by DNA derived from cells grown in the laboratory. The research involving the goats will be used to develop man-made spider silk for medical uses, said Turner. After tracking the health of the goats for a few months, scientists plan to use the cloning process again. Next time, they will inject the silk gene from spiders into the cells that will produce new cloned goats, said Turner.






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