What kind of sheep was the genetic mother of dolly

Improvements in the technique have meant that the cloning of animals is becoming cheaper and more reliable. The advances made through cloning animals have led to a potential new therapy to prevent mitochondrial diseases in humans being passed from mother to child. About 1 in people is born with faulty mitochondria, which can result in diseases like muscular dystrophy. To prevent this, genetic material from the embryo is extracted and placed in an egg cell donated by another woman, which contains functioning mitochondria.

This is the same process as used in cloning of embryonic cells of animals. Without this intervention, the faulty mitochondria are certain to pass on to the next generation. The treatment is currently not permitted for use in humans. Read about more breakthrough advances in science made through animal research in our timeline. Cloning Dolly the sheep Dolly the sheep, as the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell, is by far the world's most famous clone.

How Dolly was cloned Animal cloning from an adult cell is much more difficult than from an embryonic cell. And last year, Scottish anti-monarchists elected her as their preferred queen. When her autopsy is complete, Dolly will be stuffed and exhibited in the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh.

This is not the first Dolly relic: a jumper knitted from her wool is on show in London's Science Museum. Dolly's lung complaint was the last in a series of medical problems. Last year, Ian Wilmut, the Roslin researcher who led the team that cloned her, said that had he been a hill farmer and Dolly a regular sheep, the size of the vet's bill would already have sealed her fate.

Early in life, Dolly had a weight problem. This led to speculation that Dolly's biological age might equal that of her and her mother combined. Early last year, Dolly was revealed to have arthritis, possibly related to her corpulence. Her celebrity may be partly to blame: "For the early part of her public career, she was fed a lot of excess food to get her to perform for the cameras," says Griffin.

Dolly's breed, the Finn Dorset, can live to 11 or 12 years of age. Dolly's comparatively premature - if unnatural - death is typical of cloned animals. From conception onwards, clones suffer a higher mortality rate than non-clones. Studies in mice seem to show that this bad health persists throughout life. Some seized upon Dolly's ailments as evidence that clones are invariably sickly and age prematurely. Although it can't be ruled out that her origins made her less robust than other sheep, it is not possible to make generalizations about clones' health from the fate of a single animal.

Since Dolly, other mammals - cows, rabbits, mice, cats, goats and pigs - have also been cloned. Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. The young lamb named Dolly left , with her surrogate mother, was created by cloning at the Roslin Institute.

Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Support science journalism. But this was impractical because of low success rates. Dolly demonstrated that adult somatic cells also could be used as parents. Thus, one could know the characteristics of the animal being cloned. By my calculations, Dolly was the single success from tries at somatic cell nuclear transfer.

Sometimes the process of cloning by somatic cell nuclear transfer still produces abnormal embryos, most of which die. These days most cloning is done using cells obtained by biopsying skin. Genetics is only part of the story. Even while clones are genetically identical, their phenotypes — the characteristics they express — will be different.

Environment plays a huge role for some characteristics. Food availability can influence weight. Diseases can stunt growth. These kinds of lifestyle, nutrition or disease effects can influence which genes are turned on or off in an individual; these are called epigenetic effects. Even though all the genetic material may be the same in two identical clones, they might not be expressing all the same genes. Consider the practice of cloning winning racehorses.

This is because winners are outliers; they need to have the right genetics, but also the right epigenetics and the right environment to reach that winning potential. For example, one can never exactly duplicate the uterine conditions a winning racehorse experienced when it was a developing fetus.