Cloned Pet Puppies

If you really love your dog and have about $150,000 to spare, you can now order a clone from Korean biotechnology company RNL Bio. Geneticists revealed earlier today that they have created the first dogs cloned for commercial purposes: five puppies created with DNA from Booger the pit bull terrier. (Dogs have previously been cloned for scientific and government purposes.)

According to the Guardian,

"The five clones cost Bernann McKinney, a Californian-based farmer, £25,000 ($50,000) and were well worth it, she said at a press conference in the South Korean capital, Seoul, where the announcement was made.

". . . When Booger got cancer, McKinney had skin cells taken from the dog and preserved in the hope that science would come to her aid. Scientists at Seoul National University used the cells to create embryos, which where [sic] then implanted into two surrogate mother dogs. The puppies were born on July 28."

RNL Bio, which produced seven clones of Toppie, a drug-sniffing dog, in 2006, and four clones of a cancer-sniffing dog from Japan named Marine in 2007, says that it is also interested in cloning camels for customers in the Middle East.

Stem Cells from a Human-Pig Hybrid

British scientists will use pig eggs and DNA from a human patient with heart disease to generate stem cells. If successful, these will be the first human stem cells made from animal eggs.

A shortage of human eggs--a central ingredient in the cloning process--has stalled human cloning, so scientists are studying whether animal eggs can do the trick. (Two groups in the United Kingdom have already been given permission to move forward with hybrid research.) The concept of human-animal hybrids has proved controversial, but scientists will only generate cells from the research; they won't let the embryos develop.

According to an article in the Guardian,

Although the stem cells will not contain any animal DNA, they will not be suitable for treating humans directly. Instead, the scientists will use the cells to learn how genetic mutations cause heart cells to malfunction and ultimately cause life-threatening cardiomyopathy.

"Ultimately they will help us understand where some of the problems associated with these diseases arise, and they could also provide models for the pharmaceutical industry to test new drugs," [Warwick Medical School scientist Justin] St John says. "We will effectively be creating and studying these diseases in a dish, but it's important to say that we're at the very early stages of this research and it will take a considerable amount of time."

Human-animal hybrid research has received much more attention in the United Kingdom than in the United States, largely because the research there is governed by a central regulatory board, and details of research proposals are made public. No broad-arching regulation exists in the United States, where scientists are mainly accountable to university ethical review boards.

Real-Time Footage of an Enzyme Interacting with DNA

For the first time, scientists have been able to observe in real time the interaction between an enzyme and its DNA target. The findings could have implications for research on cancer, which can occur when enzymes fail to repair damaged DNA.

Using a technique known as fast-scan atomic force microscopy (AFM), researchers from Edinburgh, Japan, India, and Cambridge, U.K., filmed a bacterial enzyme attaching to the DNA of a virus trying to infect the bacterium.

In a press release on the research from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, which funded the work, lead researcher Robert Henderson explains,

"This is the first time that such a process has been seen in real time. To be able [to] see these nano-mechanisms as they are really happening is incredibly exciting. We can actually see the enzyme 'threading' through a loop in the virus's DNA in order to lock on to and break it, a process known as DNA cleavage.

"The microscope and new techniques give us a clear view of the molecular interactions between proteins and DNA that we could only previously interpret indirectly. The indirect methods require scientists to make assumptions to interpret their data, and video footage like this can help to provide a more direct understanding of what is really happening.

"Standard technology for filming on this scale can only produce one image frame every 8 minutes. However, our new work allows one frame per 500--or fewer, milliseconds.

"This helps us understand how enzymes recognise which bit of a DNA strand to latch onto, which is important in understanding how proteins repair damaged DNA. In the long term, this could help in the search for cancer treatments, as cancer sometimes occurs where DNA is damaged but enzymes do not behave correctly in order to repair it."

Uncovering Your Dog's Genetic History: Is He a Chia Pit or a Terrier Mix?

Pancho is a long, small dog with big ears who was adopted from the Berkeley Humane Society in 2003. Everyone who meets him has her own guess at Poncho's mysterious parentage: a terrier mix, a little pit bull, or perhaps a Chihuahua-pit bull mix, otherwise known as a Chia pit?

Sixty-five dollars and a simple swab of the inside of the cheek could finally solve that riddle. A new genetic test, marketed by Maryland-based MetaMorphix, can determine a dog's mix of breeds with 90 percent accuracy. The company has processed thousands of tests since the product went on the market in February, CEO Edwin Quattlebaum said at the Biotechnology Industry Convention in Boston earlier this week.

Because many canine diseases are linked to particular breeds, the results could help owners make health decisions about their dogs. The test has also garnered interest from animal shelters: shelter employees say that being able to provide a bit of a dog's "back story" encourages people to adopt. "Owners get a kick out of knowing the heritage of their dogs," says Quattlebaum.

The test assesses genetic markers known as single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. Each breed--the test can currently detect 38 of the most common--has a different SNP profile. The test is made possible by massive efforts to sequence the genome of different breeds of dogs, such as the dog genome project. (See "Dog DNA May Lead to Cures.")

MetaMorphix, which also does genetic testing for the American Kennel Club, is now starting to use its canine DNA database to hunt for genetic variations linked to diseases. Its first target is chronic hip dysplasia, a degenerative joint disease most often seen in large breeds, such as German shepherds, Labrador retrievers, rottweilers, Great Danes, and golden retrievers. "Eventually, people buying dogs could use this test to ensure their dog is not predisposed to this disease," says Quattlebaum. "And breeders could use it to try to breed [that variation] out of their dogs."

Victoria Jaschob, Pancho's devoted human companion, says that she's thought about ordering the test. But for now, "we just use the generic term 'Pancho dog' to describe any small, long dog with short legs and big ears," she says. "There's a million of them out there."

Partial Draft of Neandertal Genome

The first chunk of the Neandertal genome was published today in the journal Nature. It reveals that modern humans and our ancient cousins diverged about 500,000 years ago. The sequence, derived from a 38,000-year-old bone fragment found in a cave in Croatia, was made possible by a new sequencing technology developed by 454 Life Sciences . According to Michael Egholm, one of the 454 Life Sciences project's leaders, who talked to Technology Review in September, the Neandertal genome will shed light on the genetic changes that make us uniquely human. "We believe we can use the Neandertal genome as a signpost for our own genome," he says. "Our approach is to look at the 35 million base pair differences between chimp and man. Then we ask a simple question: Is Neandertal like chimp or human on those sites?" (Click here for the full text of the Q&A.)

From the paper:

Neanderthals are the extinct hominid group most closely related to contemporary humans, so their genome offers a unique opportunity to identify genetic changes specific to anatomically fully modern humans. We have identified a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil that is exceptionally free of contamination from modern human DNA. Direct high-throughput sequencing of a DNA extract from this fossil has thus far yielded over one million base pairs of hominoid nuclear DNA sequences. Comparison with the human and chimpanzee genomes reveals that modern human and Neanderthal DNA sequences diverged on average about 500,000 years ago. Existing technology and fossil resources are now sufficient to initiate a Neanderthal genome-sequencing effort.