Welcome to modern plant cloning

Unlike the old fashioned way of cloning a plant,

which involved taking a cutting and encouraging it

to turn into a new plant, at Life Technologies we

have developed a more effective way of cloning

plants in the lab.

Using a technique called tissue culture we can

create thousands of identical new plants from one

piece of plant tissue.

We take a few cells from

the plant you want to

clone, we then place them

in a petri dish and

stimulate them with plant

hormones.

We can create thousands of identical plants from just a few

cells. Unlike the old fashioned method of taking a cutting,

which can only produce a few new plants from the original

one.

For hundreds of years farmers have been cloning plants.

By taking cuttings of their most productive plants

farmers can quickly produce several genetically

identical plants. This is far cheaper then modern tissue

culture methods cloning.

Plant cloning on a budget

First you take a cutting by removing a small

piece of the plant. You only need to take part of

the stem or just part of a leaf. By using our range

of hormone rooting powders then keeping the

plant under the right conditions you can create

several genetically identical plants.

Plant cloning on a budget

Increase your best livestock

As a farmer you’ll have one or two cows that

produce more milk than any of the others.

Her offspring will most likely inherit that

attractive characteristic, but you’ll know that

in her working life she’ll probably only

produce 8-10 calves.

But, even though it may seem quite

expensive, using our cloning technology she

can produce that number of calves in a year!

How does it work? You give your best cow

fertility hormones so that she produces lots of

eggs. You then remove these eggs from her

uterus and we take them back to our lab.

We fertilise one of the eggs with sperm from

one of our best bulls to create an embryo.

Once the embryo starts dividing we split it up

into several smaller embryos.

We implant these embryos into the uteruses

of other cows . These have been given

hormones to get them ready for pregnancy

and they act as hosts for the growing embryos.

The cows give birth to several genetically identical

calves, they are all clones of each other.

These cloned embryos can be transported all

around the world and can be taken to places

where cows which produce a lot of milk are

needed.

THE FUTURE OF CLONING

You’ve seen it in science fiction, but could

you one day create a clone of yourself?

We aim to make that a reality.

In 1997 scientists successfully created a

clone of an adult sheep, they named her

‘Dolly’.

But she was the only success from hundreds

of failed (and expensive) attempts.

But with our on going research we are

trying to make it easier.

THE FUTURE OF CLONING

So how can we clone an adult?

Lets use Dolly the sheep as an example.

First we take a sample of cells from the sheep we

want to clone.

In those cells is a nucleus, this contains DNA, the

genetic information for creating that sheep. We

remove the DNA from the nucleus.

From a different sheep, we take an egg. We remove

the DNA from the nucleus of the egg and replace it

with the DNA of the sheep we want to clone.

We give it a small electric shock to start it dividing.

We then implant the egg with the new DNA into the

uterus of a host sheep who acts as a foster mother,

she then gives birth to a lamb that’s a clone of the

original sheep.

THE FUTURE OF CLONING