- 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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