Chip could lead to clone factories
A Californian company is working on a method of mass producing cloned
embryos.
It has designed a silicon chip which has hundreds of tiny egg-sized
wells
etched into it and each one has a tiny hole in the base.
If the chip full of eggs is spun in a centrifuge the dense nuclei are
forced
out through the hole and each egg is then ready to have a new nucleus
implanted.
The process has already been perfected on sea urchin eggs and is about
to
be
trialled on cow eggs, according to New Scientist.
If Aegen Biosciences succeeds, the next step will be to perfect a way of
fusing new nuclei into the egg.
They hope to do this by fixing a lid to the chip with appropriately
positioned donor cells.
The system could produce hundreds or even thousands of cloned embryos at
once.
At the moment the process has to be done by hand and has a high failure
rate.
Dr Harry Griffin, at the Roswell Institute, Edinburgh, where Dolly was
created, was unconvinced.
He said: "This sort of approach of centrifuging out the nucleus was
tried
with cattle eggs more than five years ago and has never been used
commercially, which suggests that it's not going to be revolutionising
the
field.
"Also one wonders what is the point of developing an automated system
when
the biggest problem is finding a supply of eggs."
Story filed: 19:57 Wednesday 30th January 2002
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