This is a retro monkey. He is a rhesus monkey born on July 16, 2020.
Although Retro looks like any other rhesus monkey, he was not created in any ordinary way.
Retro cloned.
On Tuesday, a research report was published on how Retro was created Nature Communications He writes CNN.
Watch the video: He goes berserk behind the wheel: – Oh my God!
-Alive and in good health
Feilong Lu is one of the researchers behind the report. He says Retro is a healthy and fast three-year-old.
– We have achieved the first cloned rhesus monkey alive and well, which is a big step forward and made the impossible possible, although the efficiency is very low compared to normal fertilized embryos, says Lu, a researcher in the country. Key Laboratory of Molecular Developmental Biology and Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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Animals that reproduce naturally are cloned through sexual reproduction by inserting the nucleus of one of the cells of the animal's body to be cloned into an egg whose nucleus has previously been removed. The nucleus of a body cell contains all the genetic information necessary for an animal to grow, he says SNL.
The first mammal to be cloned was Dolly the sheep in 1996. Pigs, cows, horses and dogs have since been cloned. Primates, on the other hand, are very similar to humans, and the rhesus monkey is the second species of primate to be cloned.
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Retro was one of 113 fetuses that were reconstructed and eventually resulted in a live birth. Photo: Qiang Sun/Nature Communications/AFP/NTP
Modified Version
The Chinese team, based in Shanghai and Beijing, used a modified version of therapeutic cloning in their work on cynomolgus monkeys (Macaca fascicularis) and modified the technique to clone a rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta).
During hundreds of failed cloning attempts, they discovered that the outer membrane that forms the placenta did not develop properly in the early cloned embryos.
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To solve this problem, they performed a procedure called endogenous cell mass transplantation, which involved placing cloned endogenous cells into a non-cloned embryo, and allowed the clone to develop normally, explains researcher Miguel Estaban, who has worked on similar projects on primates. .
– Only one live birth
The team then tested the new technique using 113 reconstructed embryos, 11 of which were transferred to seven surrogates, resulting in only one live birth, according to the study.
-We think there may be more abnormalities that need to be fixed. Strategies to increase the success rate of therapeutic cloning in primates will remain our main focus in the future, Lu says.
The ability to successfully clone monkeys could help speed up biomedical research because scientists can learn more from them than from laboratory mice, researchers say.
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Research on non-human primates has been crucial to life-saving medical advances, including the development of vaccines against Covid-19, according to a new study. a report of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, published in May.
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This research is a confirmation in principle that cloning can be done in various types of non-human primates and opens the door to new ways to increase efficiency. Cloned apes can be genetically manipulated in complex ways that wild apes cannot; This has many implications for disease modeling. There is also talk of species conservation, Estaban says.
Morally controversial
However, this is a controversial topic, and the British Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals wrote that they have serious ethical concerns about applying cloning technology to animals.
Animal cloning requires procedures that can cause pain and stress, and there can be high failure and mortality rates.
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Luis Montolio, a researcher at the National Center for Biotechnology in Spain, who was not involved in the research, says that cloning the two monkeys shows that it is possible to clone primates, but these are very difficult experiments.
He asserts that the difficulties show that human cloning is unnecessary and debatable, and that any attempts would be extremely difficult and morally unacceptable.
The team claimed that they followed Chinese laws and guidelines governing the use of non-human primates in scientific research.
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