The world's first cloned cat has given birth to a litter of three apparently healthy kittens, scientists have announced.
The kittens were revealed by researchers at Texas A&M University after being given the all-clear after extensive health checks and routine vaccinations. The university has cloned more species than any other in the world, including cattle, pigs, goats and horses.
The mother, called CC, short for Copy Cat, was born in December 2001 using the same procedure that was pioneered by researchers at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh to clone Dolly the sheep in 1997. Genetic material was plucked from the cell of a tabby cat called Rainbow and transferred to a hollowed-out egg to create a cloned embryo, which was then implanted into a surrogate feline.
The effort to clone CC was due to pave the way for a project to clone a mongrel dog called Missy after the owner, a US millionaire, gave US$5 million to the university. The project became known as "Missyplicity," but five months later Missy died and the project was abandoned.
The birth of CC triggered interest in commercial cloning services for lost or dead pets and one company has since created six cloned cats, for a fee of more than US$40,000. But CC's arrival also proved that cloning could not be relied upon to create an identical copy of an animal. Because fur patterning is determined in the womb rather than by genes, CC looked remarkably unlike her genetic mother.
Duane Kraemer, a professor of veterinary medicine who was part of the team to clone CC, bought Smokey, a male tabby, to mate with CC. Two of the resulting kittens, which were born in September, look strikingly similar to the mother, while the third has inherited the shade of its father.
"We've been monitoring their health, and all of them are fine, just like CC has been for the past five years," said Dr Kraemer.
"CC has always been a perfectly normal cat and her kittens are just that way too," he said.
The health of cloned animals is not taken for granted by scientists. The process leads to imperfections in the way genes are expressed in the developing embryo and the vast majority of cloning attempts fail as a result.
Of 87 cloned cat embryos that were transferred into surrogate females, only two led to pregnancies, with CC the only live birth.
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