Hua Hua, one of two monkeys cloned by somatic cell nuclear transferQIANG SUN & MU-MING POO, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCESResearchers in China have created the first viable primate clones made using somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), according to a study published yesterday (January 24) in Cell. Two newborn macaques, named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, were produced at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Neuroscience (ION) in Shanghai using the same technology made famous by Dolly the Sheep, and could represent a novel model system for scientists studying human biology and disease.
“This paper really marks the beginning of a new era for biomedical research,” Xiong Zhi-Qi, a researcher studying brain disease at the ION but who was not involved in the work, tells Nature.
These monkeys are not the first primates to be cloned. A rhesus macaque named Tetra was produced in the late 1990s by embryo splitting, the division of an early-stage embryo into two or four separate cells to make clones. Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, by contrast, were each made by replacing an egg cell nucleus with DNA from a differentiated body cell. The technique—which has previously been employed to clone sheep, cattle, cats, mice, and dogs—can create more clones than embryo splitting and allows researchers greater control over the edits they make ...
