the industrial growth of any developing country largely depends on the availability of abundant energy resources. according to the energy survey carried out by international atomic energy agency, (1) the contribution which nuclear energy will make towards the total energy requirements of the developed countries of the world by the end of the century will be about 50%. in iran by the year 1992 t...

Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT or cloning) returns a differentiated cell to a totipotent status; a process termed nuclear reprogramming. Reproductive cloning has potential applications in both agriculture and biomedicine, but is limited by low efficiency. To understand the deficiencies of nuclear reprogramming, our research has focused on both candidate genes and global gene expression pat...

background: over the past several years, mammals have been successfully cloned by either the splitting of an early stage embryo or nuclear transfer of adult somatic cells (nt) into oocytes. although it has been 15 years since the generation of the first cloned mammals from somatic cells by nt, the success rate for producing live offspring by this technique is low regardless of the cell type and...

Background: The beneficial effect of supplementing culture medium with melatonin has been reported during in vitro embryo development of species such as mouse, bovine and porcine. However, the effect of melatonin on the mouse somatic cell nuclear transfer remained unknown. Materials and Methods: In this study, we assessed the effects of various concentrations of melatonin (10-6 to 10-12 M) on t...

Background: For several years, mammalian cloning by splitting an early embryo or nuclear transfer into oocytes method has been successfully performed. Cloning is now also possible using adult somatic cells. Although it has now been 15 years since the first cloned mammals were generated from somatic cells using nuclear transfer (NT), the success rate for producing live offspring by cloning is lo...

clinical application of embryonic stem (es) cells faces difficulties regarding tissue rejection as well as ethical limitations. one solution for these issues is to reprogram somatic cells by the injection of their nucleus into an enucleated oocyte or zygote. however, technical complications and ethical considerations have impeded the therapeutic implications of this technology. an approach whic...

agrobacterium tumefaciens is capable of gene transfer to both plant and non-plant organisms. indeed, upon infection of eukaryotic cells, agrobacterium tumefaciens transfers a piece of its tumor inducing (ti)-plasmid, called t-dna, to the host cell nucleus, which subsequently integrates into the host genome. the vird2 virulence protein which has relaxase endonuclease activities covalently binds ...