Hello Dolly!

Dolly the cloned sheep continues to inspire research 20 years after she was revealed to the world.

14:31 25 February 2017

Dolly the cloned sheep, which was created from a mammary cell taken from a six-year-old sheep, was born in July 1996 at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh. In 2003, she died following her battle against arthritis and a lung disease. Dolly’s creation has been fundamental to stem cell research and has inspired treatments for degenerative conditions including Parkinson’s disease.

 

Professor Bruce Whitelaw, interim director of The Roslin Institute, said: 'Cloning enabled gene-targeting strategies to be used.

 

'We have now moved on from using cloning technology and instead use very efficient genetic engineering methods that can be directly applied to the fertilised egg.

 

'These are based on DNA editing technology which enable extremely precise changes of the genome of animals.

 

'We apply this exciting method in farm livestock and poultry, aiming to produce animals that are less susceptible to disease.'

 

Dolly, who was the only surviving lamb from 277 cloning attempts, bred normally on two occasions and had given birth to four lambs.

 

Professor Kevin Sinclair, a researcher at the University of Nottingham, said: 'One thing that came out of those early studies on Dolly was how inefficient the whole process was.

 

'You had to use a lot of eggs and transfer a lot of embryos just to produce a single cloned animal.

 

'This is a feature of cloning, but it's not as high as it used to be.

 

'Over the years the general efficiency has improved and so these issues are less of a problem than they were.

 

'There are reasons to be optimistic looking into the future that they might become even less of an issue,' he said.