Giant Panda Embryo Cloned Chinese scientists who chaired giant panda cloning expressed not long ago that they have successfully worked out the earlier embryo of giant panda through planting the panda's body cells into enucleate rabbit egg cells. The said development implies that the giant panda cloning project could reach its targets ahead of its plan scheduled for 3-5 years. The research group headed by Chen Dayuan, research fellow of Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, have solved one of two key issues in cloning giant panda. Their research results have been published in the latest issue of China Science. A unique feature of the result is that the heterogeneous cloning technique is used to marry enucleate white rabbit egg cells with the panda's own cells.
Heterogeneous cloning is a sophisticated technique critical to rescuing endangered animals.
At the present stage, most animal cloning are made on a homogeneous basis, namely both provider cells and receptor cells come from the same source animal. Experts pointed out that it was unrealistic to clone endangered species on homogeneous basis for it is difficult to obtain egg cells from a stock of only about a thousand giant pandas and it is necessary to study heterogeneous cloning approaches. In the said cloning experiment, body cells were taken from the skeleton mussel,uterus surface skin and mammary glands of an adult female panda after her immediate death. The receptor cells are the egg cells from a Japanese female white rabbit. The results have shown that three kinds of giant panda cell tissues were able to form embryos after marrying with enucleate rabbit egg cells with the best performance of mammary gland cells.