世界首条基因编辑克隆狗在中国出生

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Gene-editing technology has been used successfully by Chinese scientists for the first time to clone a beagle, according to a report in Science and Technology Daily.

《科技日报》报道，中国科学家利用基因编辑技术首次成功克隆一条比格犬。

The dog named Long Long has become China's first completely self-bred somatic-cell cloned dog, and the world's first gene-edited cloned dog. Somatic cells are any cell of a living organism other than the reproductive cells.

"This is a breakthrough, marking China as only the second country in the world to independently master dog-somatic clone technology, after South Korea," says Lai Liangxue, a researcher of Guangzhou institute of biological medicine and health with the Chinese academy of sciences.

Speaking to Science and Technology Daily, he explained that dogs had long been considered as one of the most difficult animals to be cloned, as the quality of their ovary cells are relatively poor, and the process of cloning embryo preparation is challenging.

In addition, dogs don’t come on heat often, which makes it's hard to synchronize the cloned embryos with the reproductive cycle of a surrogate mother.
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