Essay, Research Paper: Cloning Of Cows

Cow Cloning
Cloning has been the main topic in the news lately. Due to the success of sheep cloning with Dolly, scientist have been encouraged to experiment with other species which had led to producing Gene, the first cloned calf.
Cloning is the somatic nuclear transfer. It has been used for many years but until now, cloning has not been found to be able to take a full grow adult cow and make it have a calf with the same DNA. This report will inform of the recent studies of cow cloning. It will tell of what s has been in the news lately. This will tell what cloning is.
Cloning began in the late 80 s when they used a type of cloning that was not always the perfect outcome. Dairy farmers needed to make milk for less money, so they could make a good profit. Farmers needed the healthiest cows that gave most milk. Dairy farmers would mate the best in the herd but most of the time the cows would not turn out as good as the dairy farmer wanted them to be. Twinning is a kind if cloning where at a very early stage of development; a cow embryo is pinched in half, which produces identical twins. Still, these ways of cloning cannot be the perfect outcome excepted. Cloning was to be researched more to find a way to help farmers get perfect cows.
There are many benefits of cow cloning. This will help the dairy market all together. Dairy producers could better manage cows of the same genetic structure through feeding and breeding, since all cows will respond similar to nutrition and the environment. For example, In the future, Dairymen could select cows that produce milk yielding the best mozzarella cheese, and then clone these animals so the herd is identified for this purpose.
Beef producers and their customers will reap the benefits of cloning. Purebred cow or calf operations can clone a bull will specific desirable traits, register the clones and then use multiple bulls to produce semen with the same genetic makeup. Animals with similar or the same genetic backgrounds will perform consistently in the feedlot and produce meat with desirable nutritional and eating qualities for specific market and customer demands.
Overall, this cloning technology can help dairy and beef producers improves the effiency and profitability of their work. The consumer will benefit from a product that is more consistently and cost efficiently produced. Cloning could also enable research in feed efficiency and other important economic qualities. Use of cloned animals in research eliminates genetic inconsistency and focuses the results on the factors being tested, decreasing the amount of animals needed for research project.
In Nara Japan a technique developed by Japanese researchers promises to simplify the process of cloning mammals. Dr. Yoko Kato and colleagues at the Research Institute for Animal Developmental Biotechnology have cloned eight calves from the cells of one adult cow. The technique developed by the scientists is among the most efficient methods reported to date for producing genetically identical animals.
Efficiency is one of two key requirements for large-scale cloning of livestock; the other is that the clones be created from an adult cow. That way, animals that have already proven themselves to be good meat or milk producers can be selected for cloning.
The researchers removed the nuclei from 10 eggs of a single cow of Japanese beef cattle obtained at a slaughterhouse. They then inserted the nuclei from ten adult cells from another adult cow into the 'empty' eggs. Six nuclei were from cumulus cells, which surround the eggs inside ovaries, and four were from epithelial cells lining the oviducts. (Cumulus cells are particularly good candidates for cloning females because they can be obtained without injuring the animal.)
The egg cells were then cultured in the laboratory until they had developed into blastocysts, embryos at the earliest stages of development. These blastcysts were implanted into surrogate cows, and eight of the embryos completed development and were born. Four of the calves later died, but this was probably due to environmental causes, say the researchers.
A report from the Snow Brand Dairy Company in Japan has claimed that scientists have been able to produce cloned calves using cells derived from colostrums. The company claims that the procedure could make it safer for animals to donate their cells for cloning, as the extraction of cells from milk does not require making an incision in the donor cow, and reduces the risk of infection.
Combining the nucleus of a mammary cell extracted from colostrum with an unfertilized egg and inserting the embryo into the uterus of a surrogate cow apparently produced the cloned calves. It was the same method used to produce the sheep Dolly, the world's first cloned mammal. Three cows were made pregnant through the technique, but only two succeeded in giving birth. One of the calves was delivered through Caesarean section on April 20 and the other was born the following day. Scientist have also been able to make sheep, monkey rat and pig embryos out of cow eggs.
We learn more and more about the world everyday. Cloning is just one of them. It is amazing that we could be intelligent to find one of the mysteries of the world. Cloning is just part of the jigsaw puzzle we are figuring out, and we have more to learn about it, and other mysteries of the world.