Dolly sheep

Dolly (05-07-1996 - 14-02-2003), a Finn Dorsett ewe, was the first mammal to have been successfully cloned from an adult cell, though the first vertebrate to be cloned was a tadpole in 1952 . She was cloned at the Roslin Institute in Scotland and lived there until her death when she was six. On 2003-04-09 her stuffed remains were placed at Edinburgh's Royal Museum, part of the National Museums of Scotland.
Dolly was publicly significant because the effort showed that the genetic material from a specific adult cell, programmed to express only a distinct subset of its genes, can be reprogrammed to grow an entire new organism. Before this demonstration, there was no proof for the widely spread hypothesis that differentiated animal cells can give rise to entire new organisms.
Cloning Dolly the sheep had a low success rate per fertilized egg; she was born after 237 eggs were used to create 29 embryos, which only produced three lambs at birth, only one of which lived. Seventy calves have been created from 9,000 attempts and one third of them died young; Prometea took 328 attempts. Notably, although the first clones were frogs, no adult cloned frog has yet been produced from a somatic adult nucleus donor cell.
There were early claims that Dolly the Sheep had pathologies resembling accelerated aging. Scientists speculated that Dolly's death in 2003 was related to the shortening of telomeres, DNA-protein complexes that protect the end of linear chromosomes. However, other researchers, including Ian Wilmut who led the team that successfully cloned Dolly, argue that Dolly's early death due to respiratory infection was unrelated to deficiencies with the cloning process.


written by: Luís Montijo

posted by: Isabel Brito da Luz