Earlier this year, at the Chinese Academy of Science, two
macaque monkeys, Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, became the first two primates to be successfully
cloned using somatic cell nuclear transfer. Some might recall that this type of
cloning gained its fame in the scientific community with its first successful subject,
Dolly the Sheep. Somatic cell nuclear transfer, as its name infers, works by transferring
the nucleus from a mature body cell into an egg cell that lacks a nucleus. Thus,
the body cell DNA is rewritten by the egg cell, and therefore returns it to its
embryonic state. This rewritten embryonic cell, basically becomes a blank slate,
so to speak, that can then become any cell in the body.

But why haven’t any organism so genetically close to humans,
like the macaques, been successfully cloned like this before? Well according to
the Mu-ming Poo, the director of the Institute of Neuroscience at the Chinese
Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, the main reason primate cloning has been unsuccessful
in the past, was due to a failure to reprogram the somatic DNA by the egg. This
failure to reprogram the DNA is believed to be caused by an inability to unwind
certain sections of the DNA that are very tightly wrapped around the somatic
cells histones. To combat this and produce the successful clones found in this experiment,
the researchers added specialized molecules designed to loosened these sections
of DNA before its reprograming. This
breakthrough in cloning ability, will have significant implications on future disease
and drug testing programs, as it could make the monkeys, which are already good
genetic analogs to humans, even better test subjects, by removing any influence
genetic variation between individuals might have on the trial results.
For the article this information was gathered from use https://www.sciencenews.org/article/baby-macaques-primates-clones-dolly-sheep?mode=topic&context=88&tgt=nr
And for more information on somatic cell nuclear transfer
cloning use this link https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/somatic_cell_nuclear_transfer.htm
Us as humans will always be compared with primates!! Time will tell how far they go with research on them!
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