• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Texas A&M Researchers Clone a Horse

Posted on: Wednesday, 27 April 2005, 21:00 CDT

COLLEGE STATION, Texas - A horse has been added to the list of animals successfully cloned by researchers at Texas A&M University. School officials announced Wednesday their partnership with a French company resulted in the cloning.

A&M believes this is the first successfully cloned horse in North America. Horses had previously been cloned in Italy.

The French-American partnership was a major factor in the horse's name: Paris Texas.

"Look at him, he's gorgeous," Katrin Hinrichs, the lead scientist on the project said just before the six-week old light brown foal made his public debut. He whinnied and walked right up to several photographers who snapped his picture.

"He's very bold," said Hinrichs, a professor at Texas A&M's College of Veterinary Medicine. She also heads the school's Equine Embryo Laboratory.

A&M researchers used adult horse skin cells biopsied from a valuable horse in Europe to clone the foal, which was born March 13.

The process, which took 400 attempts over a four-month period, began with dividing the skin cells in an incubator. Horse eggs were also matured in an incubator. Just before the eggs were fertilized, they were taken out. Under a microscope, researchers removed the DNA.

The biopsied skin cells were then injected into the eggs, which were then allowed to divide and make an embryo. The embryo was then placed into the uterus of a horse. Six embryos were created but only one, Paris Texas, was successfully gestated in a host horse named Greta during a pregnancy that lasted 12 1/2 months. Horses usually have an 11-month gestation period.

"It's very inefficient at this point. People worry that we're going to produce all these cloned champions and they're going to go to horse shows and change the face of showing horses," Hinrichs said.

There are no guarantees that Paris Texas will turn out exactly the same as the donor horse but the foal's offspring will have the same characteristics, Hinrichs said.

"Really it's a method to save genetics," she said.

The knowledge acquired from the successful cloning of the horse should be a powerful tool that will allow scientists to better compare the differential affects of environment and heredity, nature versus nurture, Hinrichs said.

"It will be able to bring the frontiers of science forward, using the horse as a model," she said.

Hinrichs said the procedure could also one day be used by the private industry to clone horses. Cryozootech, A&M's Paris-based partner, is dedicated to preserving the genes of exceptional horses for their use in producing cloned offspring.

With Paris Texas, A&M has become the first academic institution in the world to clone six different species.

The first cloned cat was born at the school on Dec. 22, 2001. Since then the university has cloned several litters of pigs, a Boer goat, a disease-resistant Angus bull, the first Brahma bull and a deer.

Source: Associated Press/AP Online

More News in this Category