Tuesday 3 February 2009

Chinese Researchers Make Cloned Human Blastocysts

SCNT Using an Alternative Enucleation Method for Patient-specific Embryonic Stem Cells (ESCs) Tuesday, 03 February 2009 Cloned human embryos.China Daily report that a research team at the Shandong Stem Cell Engineering Research Center has successfully cloned five human blastulas from 135 eggs on experiment, according to a press conference jointly held by the research centre and Yantai Procreation Medicine Center on Monday. The Yantai Region is located north-central on the Shandong Peninsula, south of the Bohai Sea. Of the five cloned human blastulas, four were from skin fibroblasts of healthy donors while the other one was from lymphocytes of patients with Parkinson disease. At the press release, leader of the research team, Li Jian-yuan explained the newly invented cloning technology is expected to facilitate medical treatment for patients like the sufferers of Parkinson disease. Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) was used to generate patient-specific embryonic stem cells (ESCs) from blastocysts cloned by nuclear transfer (ntESCs). In this study, a total of 135 oocytes were obtained from 12 healthy donors (30–35 years). Human oocytes, obtained within 2 h following aspiration, were enucleated and human fibroblasts or lymphocytes were used to construct the SCNT embryos. The web edition of the science journal "Cloning and Stem Cells" reported the Chinese scientific achievement on January 27, 2009. Reference: Human Embryos Derived by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer Using an Alternative Enucleation Approach Jianyuan Li, Xuexia Liu, Haiyan Wang, Shouxin Zhang, Fujun Liu, Xuebo Wang, Yanwei Wang. Cloning and Stem Cells. ahead of print. doi:10.1089/clo.2008.0041 ......... ZenMaster


For more on stem cells and cloning, go to CellNEWS at http://cellnews-blog.blogspot.com/ and http://www.geocities.com/giantfideli/index.html

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