US experts use dead cow cells to clone calves

Lead: Xinhua news agency, Washington, DC researchers at the University of Georgia announced that they had cloned a calf from the cells of a slaughtered dead cow for the first time in the United States The results are expected to bring "a revolution" to beef production, the researchers said It is reported that this is the second successful example of cloning with dead mammalian cells In October last year, European scientists reported that they extracted somatic cells from two sheep that had been dead for 18 to 24 hours and successfully bred healthy cloned sheep using them According to a press release released by the University of Georgia, researchers at the University of Georgia extracted cells for cloning from the kidney of a cow 48 hours after it was slaughtered The cloned heifer was born by caesarean section on the 22nd of this month It is named "K.C." which is the abbreviation of "kidney cell" Professor Stace, the research director, said that beef's fat and thin degree, old or tender characteristics may all be passed on to the next generation, including the cloned offspring of cattle, so the new results will help to better study the role of genetic and environmental factors in beef production It is believed that this achievement can also provide a useful method for improving the quality of beef cattle The quality and taste of beef can only be known after the cattle are slaughtered Therefore, some experts point out that by using the cloning technology, the beef producers may be able to select the best and safest varieties for cloning according to the detection of slaughtered cattle in the future But some experts are skeptical of using cloning to improve beef quality According to Prater, a cloning expert at the University of Missouri in the United States, feed quality and other environmental factors may lead to differences in beef quality It will be very difficult to ensure that the meat quality of cloned cattle is exactly the same as that of donor cattle providing genetic materials (author:) share to feed Weibo share to: