Despite the absence of a leader, two members of the research team led by South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk have made another breakthrough in the field of dog cloning. They have successfully cloned two female dogs named “Bona” and “Peace“.
The two researchers from Hwang’s team, Professor Kim Dae-yong and his colleague Professor Lee Byeong-chun, implanted embryos into 12 surrogate dogs, resulting in three pregnancies.
The cloned female dog Bona was born on June 18, and Peace was born on July 10, both delivered through cesarean section. The third cloned dog is expected to be born this weekend.
Snuppy’s girlfriend – cloned female dog Bona.
(Photo: Korea Times)
Both of these new cloned dogs, as well as the one soon to be born, were cloned from cells of an Afghan Hound, similar to the dog Snuppy.
Professor Kim stated, “This time we have cloned more effectively.” Last year, to create the dog Snuppy, the research team had to use 123 female dogs, resulting in only three pregnancies and two successful births. However, one cloned dog died due to pneumonia.
Professor Kim plans for the two new cloned females to mate with Snuppy at the end of next year. These experiments focus on the genetic information related to asexual reproduction in dogs.
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| Professor Hwang Woo-suk with the dog Snuppy (Photo: tri-cityherald.com) |
Professor Kim explained, “Dogs live alongside humans, so they share many disease traits similar to humans. We will study various human diseases if we can create a model through dog cloning.”
Hwang, a master in the field of dog cloning, had to abandon his research after being found guilty of falsifying embryonic stem cell research data earlier this year. Nevertheless, Snuppy is still recognized as the first cloned dog in the world by many research institutes globally.
Since Snuppy was announced in the prestigious British journal Nature last August, no other research team outside of Hwang’s has succeeded in the field of dog cloning.
Professor Kim stated, “Bona has been designated for testing, but Peace is still too young to be tested. We are currently writing a paper about them.”
It is known that Professor Kim Min-kyu, the head of this research team, played a key role in the cloning of Snuppy, while Professor Lee Byeong-chun is also Hwang’s right-hand man.
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