The service was created for the owner who can not withstand the loss of their four-legged friend.
It was created by Woo Suk Hwang, a veterinary and Korean researcher from the turbulent past (he was expelled from his university for conducting human cloning research).
Sooam (company name) will clone any dog ??for $ 100,000, using the 50-year-old technique already used to clone Dolly sheep (nuclear transfer).
To begin, the cells of the dog to be cloned are picked up and extracted the nucleus, part of the cell that contains the DNA.
Subsequently, the nucleus is inserted into an egg cell taken from a donor female dog, removing the original nucleus.
The new cell will develop an embryo with the same characteristics and DNA of the dog to be cloned, which will then be reinserted into the uterus of the surrogate mother.
The surrogate mother will not necessarily have to be of the same breed, but to avoid problems in pregnancy will be a similar breed of dog.
The company has already cloned more than 400 dogs and has 15 new customers each month.
The dog obtained is an identical twin of the dog to be cloned, but may look slightly different: for example Dalmatians may develop stains differently. Clones may also not have the same personality and temperament as the original dog, since they are characteristics acquired uniquely with experience.
In a word, two individuals with the same genome are different because their experiences will never equal 100% (just observe the homozygous human twins).
The procedure is not free of risk: many dogs are born unhealthy and there may be problems, so researchers have to repeat the procedure until they finally can create a healthy dog.
However, Sooam says he never kills any dog ??during his experiments.
The company continues to think great: its next effort will be to try to bring to life a wooly mammoth, especially extinct for thousands of years.
