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Life

'Handmade cloning' success uses a chopped egg

12 July 2006

GEORGE Cloney is some pig. He’s the first to be cloned by a technique that is apparently twice as efficient as previous methods and only one-tenth as costly.

The first step in cloning a mammal is to strip an egg cell of its own nucleus. This is usually done by the process known a enucleation, in which a needle is used to suck the nucleus out of the egg. The new technique, called “handmade cloning”, achieves the equivalent by simply chopping the egg in half.

Staining identifies the nucleus-free half of the egg, which is then fused with the cell…

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