The Chinese 'Noah's Ark' of already cloned animals (we enter the laboratory of genetic replicas)

Lucas de la Cal Shanghai

Shanghai

Updated Saturday, February 10, 2024-16:56

After helping solve a dozen murder cases, a score of robberies and finding, dead or alive, missing people and fugitives from justice, Huahuangma earned the nickname of being the "Sherlock Holmes of police dogs." . In all of Yunnan, a vast province in southern China, there was no other like him. Such was his fame that even the Chinese Government awarded him a medal for police merit.

Huahuangma discovered the remote refuge in the middle of some mountains where a serial killer who had been wanted for five years was hiding. He found crucial evidence, a hotel room card, in the case a man had murdered his wife. In another he found the murder weapon, a chainsaw, that a murderer had buried in his garden. And he followed the trail of a woman who had hidden in a forest after kidnapping a baby she was going to sell on the black adoption market.

This Kunming dog, a Chinese breed of wolfdog, had extraordinary olfactory skills. A unique specimen. The problem was that Huahuangma was getting older and the Yunnan police could not find another dog with such ability to help solve crimes. So, they decided that it had to be cloned.

From the genetic material of Huahuangma, a female named Kunxun emerged from a laboratory in March 2019. Six months later, the little sniffer dog began training with the police and participating in their first operations. Huahuangma, who was seven years old, could now retire peacefully. He had been the first police dog cloned in China.

A laboratory has managed to clone two species of Qinghai cattle that were almost extinct.

It was Beijing's own Ministry of Public Security, which directs the security forces in the Asian giant, which commissioned the cloning from a company that had been making exact genetic replicas of pets for three years for 380,000 yuan, around 50,000 euros in exchange. . On the outskirts of the capital, this biotechnology company, Sinogene Biotechnology, has its base of operations.

«To create Kunxun, the genetic material of Huahuangma was extracted and sent to the laboratory. We designed an embryo using an egg from another dog and then it was implanted in a surrogate mother, a small beagle, on whom we then performed a cesarean section," details Liu Xiaojuan, one of the scientists who participated in the process.

99% OF YOUR DNA

After Kunxun, who shares 99% of his DNA with Huahuangm, Sinogene created six other police dogs to work as trackers in a canine brigade in Beijing. The litter came from two donor dogs, a pair of veteran Belgian Malinois who had made careers in the narcotics unit and the missing persons unit. According to their trainers, the capabilities of cloned dogs, as well as their learning processes, are greater than those of dogs whose genetic origin does not come from a four-legged Sherlock Holmes.

In the photo that opens the report, Kunxun, a 5-year-old wolfdog, came from the genetic material of the best Chinese police dog of all time, Huahuangma, who retired in 2019. Above, as a puppy.

28 years have passed since that historic milestone for Science that was the birth of Dolly the sheep, created thanks to a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer (scientists reconstruct an unfertilized egg by fusing a somatic cell nucleus with an egg to which the core had been removed). Since then, China has invested a lot of investment and brilliant scientists in genetic research to create its own Noah's Ark of cloned animals: police dogs, cats, cows, pigs and horses.

There are even copies of endangered animals. This week, one of the scientific news in the Asian superpower has been that two species of cattle, Zhangmu and Apeijiaza, native to the Qinghai plateau, near Tibet, have been successfully cloned. Only 19 head of cattle remained from the first and 39 from the second. Now, four male calves of these species have just been born, artificially produced using somatic cell cloning technology. A couple of years ago, Sinogene Biotechnology, the same company that created the Kunxun police dog, achieved the first cloning of a wild Arctic wolf, also in danger of extinction. From the process a wolf was born and was baptized Maya.

Although there are plans to mass produce police dogs or competition horses, the factory will also focus on creating cows such as "super productive" ones.

«Cloning was achieved by constructing more than 130 new embryos from enucleated oocytes from a dog and somatic cells from an adult arctic wolf. This was followed by the transfer of more than 80 embryos into the wombs of seven beagles, of which one was born as a healthy wolf. The selection of a dog as a substitute for the wolf was made because they share genetic ancestry with ancient wolves and are more likely to be successful through cloning technology," explains expert Liu Xiaojuan.

The first horse cloned in China for equestrian sport also came out of the Sinogene laboratory last year. They called him Zhuang Zhuang and he is a clone of a German competition mare. With the growing popularity of show jumping tournaments and the shortage of high-performance horses in the Asian country, the Chinese Equestrian Industry Association has now opted for cloning.

HORSES AND PETS

Although the Sinogene laboratory says that more and more clients are coming to clone horses and police dogs, its main business continues to be the basis on which the company was founded: the cloning of pets. The boom in copies of domestic dogs and cats in China came after the news in 2018 that, in the United States, Hollywood star Barbra Streisand had ordered two clones of her dog Samantha, who had died a year earlier. The president of Argentina, Javier Milei, also cloned Conan, a mastiff that died in 2017, up to four times.

The first cloned horse and an endangered arctic wolf.

The Sinogene team already has more than 500 cloned pets. The copies of the cats cost around 20,000 euros less than those of the dogs. The company maintains a breeding base on the outskirts of Beijing with about 1,000 beagles, the laboratory breed commonly chosen globally. Immature eggs are collected from these animals and then combined with the cells of the parent dog to form embryos, which are implanted in the surrogate mother. A cloned puppy takes an average of half a year to be born and, after an observation period of two months, it is delivered to its owners.

Near the Sinogene facilities, in the neighboring port city of Tianjin, the project to build the largest animal cloning factory in the world has been underway for some time. Although there are plans to mass produce police dogs or competition horses, the factory will focus on creating cows like the "super productive" ones that were cloned last year by scientists at the Northwest University of Agricultural and Forestry Technology in Shaanxi province. .

THE COWS WITH 100 TONS OF MILK

These cows of the Holstein Friesian breed, originally from the Netherlands, can produce, according to researchers, an unusually high amount of milk, such as 18 tons of milk per year - 100 tons of milk throughout their life -, almost double than that produced by an average cow in most countries.

"We created 120 cloned embryos from ear cells of highly productive cows and placed them in surrogate cows," explains Jin Yaping, the project's lead scientist. "Only five out of every 10,000 cows in China can produce 100 tons of milk in their lifetime, making them a valuable resource for reproduction because today 70% of China's dairy cows are being imported from abroad." .

From cows to pigs, because in 2022 scientists from the University of Nankai University (in Tianjin), using artificial intelligence, took a big step in cloning by creating the first pigs cloned entirely by a robot, something they already achieved five years before cloning the first piglets.

“Every step of the cloning process was automated and no human hands were involved,” says Liu Yaowei, the team leader. «The use of robots has increased the success rate of the cloning process because the cells are less likely to be damaged. “It also frees up scientists because somatic cell nuclear transfer – the technique used – is a painstaking, time-consuming manual process performed under a microscope.”

From pigs to monkeys. Four years ago, a new species of rhesus monkey - the one usually used in biomedical research, originally from Southeast Asia - called Retro was born in Beijing. «It is only the second species of primate that scientists have been able to successfully clone. The same team of Chinese researchers announced in 2018 that they had created two cynomolgus monkeys (a type of macaque) that are still alive," says a study published last January in the journal Nature. The best police dogs, endangered species extinction, super productive cows, pigs created by robots... China also stands out as a power in genetic manipulation, although with limits with respect to humans. The case of "Chinese Doctor Frankenstein" is still very much alive: He Jiankui spent three years in prison for using a gene editing tool called CRISPR to modify human embryos of twin girls in the hope of making them immune to HIV.

LULÚ AND NANA, DOCTOR HE'S GIRLS

It was the first - and to date the only - experiment of this type carried out to the end in the world. Two girls were born to him in 2018, known by their pseudonyms Lulu and Nana (although almost everything about them is unknown, it is known that their health is being monitored and supervised by health authorities, and that it will be this way until they are 5 years old, or until the age of 18, in accordance with the promise that the condemned He Jiankui had made to all the parents participating in his experiments).

He would end up confessing that there was a third genetically edited baby in the laboratory he had at the Shenzhen University of Science and Technology.

He was disowned for his lack of medical ethics and in China he was convicted for an illegal operation of genetic editing of human embryos and for falsifying documents so that doctors unknowingly implanted these genetically edited embryos in two women.