This time a pet pooch has been cloned in China
Wednesday, December 19, 2018 IST
BEIJING: Juice is a one-foot tall canine wonder who has starred in dozens of Chinese film and television productions. As he gets older and his illustrious career peaks, his Beijing-based master has one wish for the mutt - to live on. Maybe forever.
A mongrel stray adopted off the streets, the nine-year-old Juice - or "Guozhi" in Mandarin - is unable to reproduce since he was neutered from an early age. But his master, animal trainer He Jun, wants to continue his star pooch's image by making a genetic clone. "Juice himself is a piece of intellectual property with social influence," said He.
To achieve that, He went to Sinogene, China's first biotech company to provide pet cloning services. Sinogene made headlines when it successfully cloned a geneedited beagle in May last year. A month later, it launched commercial cloning services. For at least 380,000 yuan ($55,065), pet owners can clone their pets.
Sinogene's CEO Mi Jidong said the company's pet cloning business is in its initial stages, but he plans to expand services to eventually include gene editing.
In Juice's case, skin samples were collected from the dog's lower abdomen and within weeks, Sinogene was able to isolate his DNA and fertilise an egg. The fertilised egg is then surgically inserted into the uterus of a surrogate mother dog - in this case a beagle. Juice's copy, "Little Juice" - or "Zhizhi" in Chinese -was born in mid-September and stayed with its surrogate mother in Sinogene's lab for about a month. The puppy was later given to He at a small ceremony at which the original Juice was present. While He has not committed Little Juice to show business just yet, he sees lots of potential.
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