it barks like a clone, it's a clone: Snuppy appears to be the real thing
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
By Byron Spice, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Say what you will about other findings by disgraced South Korean reseacher Hwang Woo-suk, but Snuppy the cloned dog appears to be the real thing.
An investigatory panel at Seoul National University yesterday said that genetic testing by three independent centers had confirmed that Snuppy, the Afghan hound pup, is a genetic match to its purported donor "father," a 3-year-old Afghan named Tai.
And researchers at the National Human Genome Research Institute, who conducted similar testing on behalf of the journal Nature, which published the cloning claim last August, likewise found genetic evidence consistent with Snuppy being a clone.
But Elaine Ostrander, chief of the agency's cancer genetics branch and a dog genome authority, yesterday said her tests couldn't rule out the possibility that Snuppy was cloned, not from a mature, adult cell removed from Tai, but from an embryonic cell. Cloning by using an embryonic cell is considered easier than cloning from a fully mature cell. The genes of an adult cell would require more reprogramming than those from an embryonic cell.
The cloned-dog paper was one of two research papers published last year that was co-authored by Dr. Hwang and Gerald Schatten, a reproductive biologist at the University of Pittsburgh. A Pitt investigative panel is now reviewing Dr. Schatten's role in both those papers.
To test the dog cloning claim, Dr. Ostrander and her colleagues tested blood samples that had been removed from Snuppy, from the donor "father" Tai and from the mixed breed that provided the egg used to produce Snuppy. They also did genetic analyses of 13 other Afghan dogs and a labrador retriever (the same breed as Snuppy's surrogate mother).
Using a set of genetic markers routinely used by the American Kennel Club to determine paternity, they found that Snuppy and Tai were such a close match that the chances are infinitesimally small that they aren't the same, Dr. Ostrander said.
If Snuppy was a clone, however, its mitochondrial DNA would match that of the egg donor, not Tai. Sure enough, Dr. Ostrander found 12 mismatches between the mitochondrial DNA of Tai and Snuppy, about the number that would be expected of an egg donated by a mutt.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
To sign-off Parkinsn send a message to: mailto:[log in to unmask]
In the body of the message put: signoff parkinsn
