China released the world's first robot cloned pig

In March 2022, a surrogate mother gave birth to seven cloned calves at the School of Artificial Intelligence at Nankai University, Tianjin. "Every step of the cloning process is automatic and no human is involved," said Liu Yaowei, a member of the research team.

Pigs cloned by vegetative cell nuclear transfer.

Liu also emphasized that the use of robots also increases the success rate of the cloning process because they are less likely to cause cell damage during complex cloning procedures. If effective, this automated system has the potential to grow into a cloning kit that any company or institute can afford, freeing scientists from the costly manual cloning work. a lot of time and effort, said Pan Dengke, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

Pan, founder of Clonorgan Biotechnology in Chengdu, used to create more than 1,000 hand-cloned pigs every day. The process was so time-consuming and complicated that it gave him back pain. The most common technique for cloning an embryo in the laboratory is somatic cell nuclear transfer, which is carried out under a microscope. This technique requires both oocytes and vegetative cells taken from the animal to be cloned. The researchers removed the nucleus from an egg cell from another animal, replacing it with a nucleus from a somatic cell.

In 2017, a team at Nankai University created the world's first cloned piglets using a robot, although some steps in the process, including removing the egg cell's nucleus, are still performed by humans. presently. Since then, they have improved the control algorithm and can now do everything automatically. The researchers will report the technical details in a paper published in the journal Engineering.

Over the past five years, the team has also increased the success rate of cloned embryos from 21% to 27.5%, compared with 10% when done manually. "Our AI system can calculate the type inside the cell and direct the robot to use minimal force to complete the cloning process, reducing cell damage caused by human hands," Liu said. To share.

Liu and his colleagues hope that the new achievements can help increase the number of high-quality pigs in China, helping the world's largest pork consumer to become less dependent on imports. Robotic cloning also has a wide range of applications in animal husbandry, including assisted reproduction and breeding. The team is looking to commercialize the robotic cloning process.