Artificial creation of genetically identical individuals--reproductive cloning

Emergence of individuality in genetically identical mice.

Brain plasticity as a neurobiological reflection of individuality is difficult to capture in animal models. Inspired by behavioral-genetic investigations of human monozygotic twins reared together, we obtained dense longitudinal activity data on 40 inbred mice living in one large enriched environment. The exploratory activity of the mice diverged over time, resulting in increasing individual di...

Reproductive cloning: can cloning harm the clone?

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The ethics of reproductive cloning.

Artificial cloning of domestic animals.

Domestic animals can be cloned using techniques such as embryo splitting and nuclear transfer to produce genetically identical individuals. Although embryo splitting is limited to the production of only a few identical individuals, nuclear transfer of donor nuclei into recipient oocytes, whose own nuclear DNA has been removed, can result in large numbers of identical individuals. Moreover, clon...

Phenotypic variation in a genetically identical population of mice.

The parental alleles of an imprinted gene acquire their distinctive methylation patterns at different times in development. For the imprinted RSVIgmyc transgene, methylation of the maternal allele is established in the oocyte and invariably transmitted to the embryo. In contrast, the methylation of the paternal allele originates during embryogenesis. Here, we show that the paternal methylation ...