Researchers in China announced their progress in developing a fully robotic process for cloning pigs. This progress could help the country with the world's largest pork consumer reduce its dependence on imported pigs.
In March, a surrogate mother gave birth to seven cloned piglets at the College of Artificial Intelligence at Nankai University in Tianjin, China.
"Every step of the cloning process is automated, and involves absolutely no human operation," said Liu Yaowei, a member of the team that developed the system.
Liu added that the use of robots has also increased the success rate of the cloning process, as it is less likely to damage cells during the complex cloning process. Previously, this problem was an obstacle to the wider use of the technique.
"If successful, this automated system could be developed into a cloning device that any company or research institute can buy, eliminating the need for scientists to perform time-consuming manual cloning," said Pan Dengke, a former researcher at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences who helped produce China's first cloned pig in 2005.
Pig cloning process
The most common technique for cloning viable embryos in the laboratory is called somatic cell nuclear transfer. This process is laborious and time consuming and needs to be done under a microscope.
It takes egg cells (oocytes) and body cells (somatic cells) that were last taken from an animal to be cloned. Researchers then removed the nucleus from the egg, which could have come from another animal, and replaced it with the nucleus from the body's cell.
In 2017, the Nankai University team produced the world's first piglet cloned using a robot. But in this first experiment, some parts of the cloning process, including the removal of the egg's nucleus, still have to be done by humans.
Since then, the research team improved their control algorithm and can now perform fully automated cloning.
"The peer-reviewed paper will soon appear in the Engineering journal to report on the technical details," Liu said.
In the last five years, the team has also been able to increase the success rate of developing cloned embryos from 21% to 27.5%, compared to a 10% success rate for manual surgery.
"Our AI-powered system can calculate the tension in cells and direct the robot to use minimal force to complete the cloning process, which reduces cell damage caused by human hands," he added.
Liu hopes this progress can make stockpiles of high-quality pork more widely available in China, and may even help the country become self-reliant amid concerns about the vulnerability of import restrictions from the US and other Western countries.
Pan said the cloning technique using robots, as well as the broader science of cell micro-manipulation, could be applied to a variety of applications in animal husbandry, including selective reproduction and breeding.
"We look forward to the commercialization of robotic cloning which will no doubt have a profound and profound impact on industry and the lives of the general public."