000743 Australia Beefs Up Efforts to Create Perfect Cow

Canberra, Australia - Australian scientists said they would step up cloning experiments later this year in a bid to produce top-quality bulls and dairy cows.

Australia announced its first successful genetic cloning in May. Scientists from Victoria state produced two Holstein calves -- Suzi and Mayzi -- from skin cells, while a team from South Australia produced a Merino lamb -- Matilda.

Japanese government officials announced earlier this week that a cloned cow had given birth to a 26.5 kilogram (58 pound) calf, the first such birth ever to a cloned cow.

Other cloned animals such as Scotland's Dolly the sheep -- the world's first cloned mammal in 1997 -- have also been successfully bred.

It has been possible to clone animals from embryonic cells for a decade.

But Dolly was cloned using somatic cells that make up the kidneys, hair, skin and other parts of the mammalian body. Suzi, Mayzi and Matilda were the first Australian animals cloned using that technique.

Professor Alan Trounson, deputy director at the Monash Institute of Reproduction and Development that produced Suzi and Mayzi, said the calves were doing well and were being kept in a quarantined area at a farm in Victoria.

“They are good-quality dairy calves and are healthy, happy and behaving normally,” Trounson, who runs Australia's only cattle-cloning project, said.

Valuable Animals

“We've now taken cells from the calves, prepared the cell-lines and plan to clone these animals to test some very specific alterations to improve the performance of the animals with regards to milking characteristics by the end of the year,” he said.

Scientists believe this breakthrough in cloning and the current speed of development could push the price of a cloned embryo down to A$30-40 (US$18-24) within a decade, dramatically improving the milk, meat or wool quality from the average farm animal.

Trounson said Australia currently has no regulations governing milk or meat from cloned animals but the availability of these products to consumers was still some time away.

He said Suzi and Mayzi were currently too young to reproduce but when aged about 12 months this would be tried.

“But we have had a look at their reproductive organs and everything seems to be sound,” Trounson said.

“We don't want to try to breed them too quickly because they are valuable animals and we want them to mix into herds first.”

Trounson said the institute was also planning to clone bulls this year using somatic cells.

He said the experiments using somatic cells differed from the earlier experiments using embryonic cells because the animals used were of better quality and more valuable as a commodity.

The technique used to create Suzi and Mayzi involved removing skin cells from a cow fetus which were grown in a laboratory and individual cells fused into eggs from which the original genetic material was removed. The embryos were implanted in normal cows.

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