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fork(2) writes:

In a Nature news feature, reporter Ewen Callaway looks back at Dolly the sheep's legacy, 20 years after her birth with a series of reminiscences of those who were there.

Karen Walker, embryologist, PPL Therapeutics: On the day we made Dolly, we had such a rubbish day.

Bill Ritchie, embryologist, Roslin Institute: It was 8 February 1996. I looked it up. We do know it was a rubbish day: we had various problems with infections and things.

Walker: It's a shame the building has been demolished, otherwise you could see the room in which Dolly was made. I use the word 'room' loosely, because it really was just a big cupboard, which, when Bill and I were in there, you could just get two chairs and the incubator in.

Ritchie: It literally was the cupboard. It was the storage cupboard at the end of the lab. When we got camera crews in later, they couldn't believe it, there was no room to shoot.

Walker and Ritchie were part of a project at the Roslin Institute and spin-off PPL Therapeutics, aiming to make precise genetic changes to farm animals. The scientific team, led by Roslin embryologist Ian Wilmut, reasoned that the best way to make these changes would be to tweak the genome of a cell in culture and then transfer the nucleus to a new cell.

The article contains reminiscences of about 10 of the people involved. It ends with Wilmut's comment: "It would be wrong to say my name's known all the way around the world -- but Dolly's is."

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Scientists at the University of Nottingham have found that cloned sheep age normally and in good health. The scientists are monitoring 13 cloned sheep, including four that are genomic copies of Dolly, the first cloned animal:

The birth of Dolly in 1996 made headlines and captured people's attention as it provided evidence that a living creature could be completely cloned. Now, twenty years after Dolly's birth, a team of scientists led by the University of Nottingham have declared that cloned sheep age healthily after conducting the first long-term study into the health of cloned sheep.

The scientists performed cardiovascular and metabolic assessments, blood pressure measurements and musculoskeletal scans on 13 cloned sheep and compared the results to uncloned control sheep. Results show that all cloned sheep are healthy with no signs of metabolic diseases and have normal blood pressure readings. One sheep had moderate osteoarthritis - a joint disease that also affected Dolly and raised concerns of premature ageing.

The cloned sheep were between seven to nine years old - approximately equivalent to 60 to 70 in human years, according to the University of Nottingham. Kevin Sinclair, lead author of the paper and professor of developmental biology at the University of Nottingham said the sheep were healthy considering their age.

The cloned sheep have to die before their telomere lengths can be accurately measured.

Also at NPR.

Healthy ageing of cloned sheep (open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12359)

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Various news outlets are reporting on work published in Nature Communications (open, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms15112) (DX) on:

Coverage:

• The Verge
• Science
• BBC News
• Scientific American
• USA Today

Related stories:
Scientists Keep Human Embryos Alive Longer Outside of the Womb
Prematurely Born Lambs Kept Alive With Artificial External Placenta - Human Babies Could be Next

Original Submission

takyon writes:

New Natural Selection: How Scientists Are Altering DNA to Genetically Engineer New Forms of Life

Before human beings wrote books or did math or composed music, we made leather. There is evidence hunter-gatherers were wearing clothes crafted from animal skins hundreds of thousands of years ago, while in 2010 archaeologists digging in Armenia found what they believed to be the world's oldest leather shoe, dating back to 3,500 B.C. (It was about a women's size 7.) For a species sadly bereft of protective fur, being able to turn the skin of cows or sheep or pigs into clothing with the help of curing and tanning would have been a lifesaving advance, just like other vital discoveries Homo sapiens made over the course of history: the development of grain crops like wheat, the domestication of food animals like chickens, even the all-important art of fermentation. In each case, human beings took something raw from the natural world—a plant, an animal, a microbe—and with the ingenuity that has enabled us to dominate this planet, turned it into a product.

[...] Modern Meadow's microbes can produce collagen much faster than it would take to raise a cow or sheep from birth, and the company can work with brands to design entirely new materials from the cell level up. "It's biology meets engineering," says Andras Forgacs, the co-founder and CEO of Modern Meadow. "We diverge from what nature does, and we can design it and engineer it to be anything we want."\

That is the promise of synthetic biology, a technology that is poised to change how we feed ourselves, clothe ourselves, fuel ourselves—and possibly even change our very selves. While scientists have for decades been able to practice basic genetic engineering—knocking out a gene or moving one between species—and more recently have learned to rapidly read and sequence genes, now researchers can edit genomes and even write entirely original DNA. That gives scientists incredible control over the fundamental code that drives all life on Earth, from the most basic bacterium to, well, us. "Genetic engineering was like replacing a red light bulb with a green light bulb," says James Collins, a biological engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of synthetic biology's early pioneers. "Synthetic biology is introducing novel circuitry that can control how the bulbs turn off and on."

The article discusses a number of topics, including microbe-grown collagen for leather, Genome Project-write, synthetic cells, a company using yeast to make perfumes and other products, and the falling (but still high) cost of DNA synthesis.

Related: Project to Synthesise Genes Mooted
Scientists Engineer First Semisynthetic Organism With Three-base-pair DNA
Scientists Create Independent Synthetic Cell With Smallest Known Genome

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Sheep have been trained to recognize human faces, such as that of Baaahrack Obama:

Sheep have demonstrated the ability to recognise familiar human faces, according to a study. Cambridge University researchers were able to train sheep to identify the faces of actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Emma Watson, former US President Barack Obama and BBC newsreader Fiona Bruce. After training, the sheep chose photos of familiar faces over unfamiliar ones significantly more often than not.

It shows that sheep possess similar face recognition abilities to primates. Previous studies had shown that sheep could identify other sheep and human handlers that they already knew.

"What we did is ask whether a sheep could learn to recognise someone from a photograph," the study's lead author Prof Jenny Morton said. "We focused on whether or not an animal was capable of processing a two-dimensional object as a person."

Sheep recognize familiar and unfamiliar human faces from two-dimensional images (open, DOI: 10.1098/rsos.171228) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

The world's most famous sheep didn't experience accelerated aging due to cloning, University of Nottingham researchers report:

In the scientific version of her obituary, Dolly the Sheep was reported to have suffered from severe arthritis in her knees. The finding and Dolly's early death from an infection led many researchers to think that cloning might cause animals to age prematurely.

But new X-rays of Dolly's skeleton and those of other cloned sheep and Dolly's naturally conceived daughter Bonnie indicate that the world's first cloned mammal had the joints of normal sheep of her age. Just like other sheep, Dolly had a little bit of arthritis in her hips, knees and elbows [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-15902-8] [DX], developmental biologist Kevin Sinclair of the University of Nottingham in England and colleagues report November 23 in Scientific Reports.

The researchers decided to reexamine Dolly's remains after finding that her cloned "sisters" have aged normally and didn't have massive arthritis (SN: 8/20/16, p. 6). No formal records of Dolly's original arthritis exams were kept, so Sinclair and colleagues got Dolly and Bonnie's skeletons and those of two other cloned sheep, Megan and Morag, from the National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh. Megan and Bonnie were both older than Dolly at the time of their deaths and had more bone damage than Dolly did. Morag died younger and had less damage.

How many times has the story of Dolly's death at the ripe age of 6 (with a supposed genetic starting age of 6 due to shorter telomeres) been used as a bludgeon against cloning?

Previously: Dolly at 20: The Inside Story on the World's Most Famous Sheep
Cloned Sheep Age Normally

Original Submission

takyon writes:

First monkey clones created in Chinese laboratory

Two monkeys have been cloned using the technique that produced Dolly the sheep. Identical long-tailed macaques Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua were born several weeks ago at a laboratory in China.

Scientists say populations of monkeys that are genetically identical will be useful for research into human diseases. But critics say the work raises ethical concerns by bringing the world closer to human cloning.

Qiang Sun of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Neuroscience said the cloned monkeys will be useful as a model for studying diseases with a genetic basis, including some cancers, metabolic and immune disorders. "There are a lot of questions about primate biology that can be studied by having this additional model," he said.

[...] Prof Robin Lovell-Badge of The Francis Crick Institute, London, said the [somatic cell nuclear transfer] technique used to clone Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua remains "a very inefficient and hazardous procedure". "The work in this paper is not a stepping-stone to establishing methods for obtaining live born human clones," he said.

China will get the job done while 洋鬼子 twiddle their thumbs in their ivory towers.

Cloning of Macaque Monkeys by Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2018.01.020) (DX)

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Breakthrough as scientists grow sheep embryos containing human cells

Growing human organs inside other animals has taken another step away from science-fiction, with researchers announcing they have grown sheep embryos containing human cells.

Scientists say growing human organs inside animals could not only increase supply, but also offer the possibility of genetically tailoring the organs to be compatible with the immune system of the patient receiving them, by using the patient's own cells in the procedure, removing the possibility of rejection. [...] "Even today the best matched organs, except if they come from identical twins, don't last very long because with time the immune system continuously is attacking them," said Dr Pablo Ross from the University of California, Davis, who is part of the team working towards growing human organs in other species.

[...] Ross and colleagues have recently reported a major breakthrough for our own species, revealing they were able to introduce human stem cells into early pig embryos, producing embryos for which about one in every 100,000 cells were human. These chimeras – a term adopted from Greek mythology – were only allowed to develop for 28 days.

Now, at this week's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin, Texas, the team have announced that they have managed a similar feat with sheep embryos, achieving an even higher ratio of human to animal cells. "About one in 10,000 cells in these sheep embryos are human," said Ross.

Japan is expected to lift a ban on growing human organs inside of animals.

Here's another article about pig-to-human organ transplants.

Also at The Telegraph.

Related: Surgeons Smash Records With Pig-to-Primate Organ Transplants
Human-Animal Chimeras are Gestating on U.S. Research Farms
Pig Hearts Survive in Baboons for More than Two Years
NIH Plans To Lift Ban On Research Funds For Human-Animal Chimera Embryos
Human-Pig 'Chimera Embryos' Detailed
Rat-Mouse Chimeras Offer Hope for Diabetics
eGenesis Bio Removes PERV From Pigs Using CRISPR

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Wanna Delay Aging? Get Castrated, Scientists Say:

According to new research, there may be a surprisingly effective way for men to increase their lifespans — but it requires a pretty severe alteration to the physical body that may not appeal to everybody.

[...] "Both farmers and scientists have known for some time that castrated male sheep live on average much longer than their intact counterparts; however, this is the first time anyone has looked at DNA to see if it also ages slower," said Victoria Sugrue, a researcher at the University of Otago and lead author of a paper about the research published in the journal eLife, in a statement.

[...] "We developed a way to measure biological age in a broad range of mammals — we have looked at over 200 species so far and discovered surprising commonality in which animals age," said study co-author Steve Horvath, professor from the University of California in Los Angeles, in the statement. "But the sheep study was unique in that it specifically isolated the effects of male hormones on aging."

[...] "We found that males and females have very different patterns of DNA aging in sheep; and that despite being male, the castrates [wethers] had very feminine characteristics at specific DNA sites," said Tim Hore, research team co-leader and lecturer at Otago, in the statement.

[...] "Interestingly, those sites most affected by castration also bind to receptors of male hormones in humans at a much greater rate than we would expect by chance," Hore said. "This provides a clear link between castration, male hormones and sex-specific differences in DNA aging."

Journal Reference:
Victoria J Sugrue, Joseph Alan Zoller, Pritika Narayan, et al. Castration delays epigenetic aging and feminizes DNA methylation at androgen-regulated loci, (DOI: 10.7554/eLife.64932)

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/doctors-fish-out-more-than-a-dozen-tiny-maggots-from-mans-eye/

On Wednesday, doctors in France reported a rare case of tiny sheep bot fly larvae—aka maggots—infesting the outer surface of a man's eyeball.

The small, spiky larvae were seen slithering around the man's peeper, which explained the redness and itchiness he was experiencing. Doctors counted more than a dozen of the disturbing grub-like critters outside the eyeball and surrounding tissue. Doctors had no choice but to pluck the bloodsuckers out, one by one, using forceps. The doctors also prescribed topical antibiotic treatments in case they missed any bugs
[...]
Regarding the case in France, published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, the man was lucky. The infestation was only external ophthalmomyiasis, meaning the larvae didn't get inside his eyeball.

Original Submission

c0lo writes:

https://www.scienceofintelligence.de/press-release-sheep-are-more-democratic-than-you-think/

Collective motion brings to mind fascinating images, such as the flocks of birds over a corn field, or schools of barracudas as they move in circles in the water. These motions are also particularly appealing to physicists, as the patterns that emerge lend themselves to mathematical and statistical modeling that can help them better understand this phenomenon. When it comes to sheep, many studies describe the collective behavior in sheep flocks as a self-organized process where individuals continuously adapt their direction and speed to follow the motion and collective decisions of the group – as if the only leading force were the "collective brain" itself. This view, however, does not take into account that animals do not move continuously, or the possible hierarchies existing in many animal groups and the potential benefits of having a single individual lead the way.

[...] According to Gómez-Nava and collaborators, when the sheep stop to feed or rest between one collective motion phase and the next, they randomly pick a new group leader for the next round of flocking, thus transferring control to a new individual each time. In this way, individuals take turns being leaders and the flock's collective intelligence is achieved democratically, over many collective motion phases.