Two American companies have teamed up in order to create 'mass-produced' 'cloned' chickens for the US market. Origen Therapeutics from California and Embrex in North Carolina have been given a $4.7 million development grant by the US National Institute of Science and Technology.
Although the process involved is not actually cloning, it does involve selecting chickens with desirable traits and almost replicating them. Origen intends to take embryonic stem cells from fertilised eggs as soon as they are laid, and culture the cells. Millions of the cells could be grown, and then these 'donor' cells would be injected into the embryo of a freshly laid recipient egg, using technology developed by Embrex than can inject up to 50,000 eggs an hour. This would form a chimera chicken containing cells from both the donor and recipient egg: it is thought that 95 per cent of the cells will come from the donor.
The development has caused concern among animal rights activists but will be welcomed by poultry farmers, says the New Scientist, as 'billions of clones could be produced each year to supply chicken farms with birds that all grow at the same rate, have the same amount of meat, and taste the same'.
Sources and References
-
Clone farm
-
Mass-produced chicken 'clones' on way
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.