Cloning Animal Safety
By: Jacob and Zachary
What is Cloning?
Why Cloning?
Animal Cloning is a reliable way of keeping good quality livestock to provide us with nutrition. Reproducing livestock genetics makes sure that herds are kept at the best quality possible. Cloning Animals offers great benefits to consumers, farmers, and endangered species. For example, Cloning allows farmers and ranchers to accelerate the reproduction of their most productive livestock in order to better produce safe and healthy food. Also, Cloning can be used to protect endangered species. For example, in Africa, Black Rhino cells are being kept on watch should this species' numbers be threatened by extinction.
The Cloning Process
A common method of cloning, known as "nuclear transfer," requires two kinds of cell. The somatic cell is one of then, which has been taken form the animal that is going to be cloned or the genetic donor. The somatic cell contains DNA of the animal it came from. For cloning purposes, somatic cells are normally achieved by a routine skin procedure performed by a vet. The other kind of cell need for cloning is an egg cell, which is collected from a girl of the same species (known as the "egg donor"). In the lab, a scientist takes and gets rid of the nucleus of the egg cell, which is the part of the cell that contains the egg donor's DNA. If you want to get a clone you need to get the DNA from the nucleus completely gone. The scientist then puts in the somatic cell from the genetic donor into the egg and combine the two with electricity. The resulting fused egg contains the genetic donor's DNA.
Citations
"BIO | Healing, Fueling and Feeding the World." BIO | Healing, Fueling and Feeding the World. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Nov. 2015.