Somatic cell nucleus transfer in mammals: elucidating the role of the maternal nucleoli

Project no. 523/09/1878
Category PROJEKTY GA ČR / Czech Science Foundation PROJECTS
ProviderGA ČR
Description

The principle of animal cloning is simple and straightforward: the nuclear material from the oocyte is removed (metaphase II) and replaced with the nuclear material of a somatic cell. The efficiency of nuclear transfer is however very low (about 3% of offspring from successfully reconstructed embryos) and what is also important is that many cloned animals are evidently abnormal. The reasons for the low cloning efficiency are not known and it is commonly accepted that the insufficient reprogramming of the transferred nucleus is the main problem. As we demonstrated recently (Ogushi et al., 2008), even from the biological point of view, the whole procedure is only poorly understood. In our experiments we would like to expand our original results in whichwe demonstrated the maternal origin of nucleoli in cloned embryos. We do believe that only the detailed analysis may improve the efficiency of this promising procedure and lead to its exploitation in agriculture, for the preservation of endangered species, as well as in human medicine (therapeutic cloning, pharmacotherapy).

Period2009 - 2011
Databse link (CZ)GA523%2F09%2F1878