WEDNESDAY, March 8 (HealthDay News) -- Snuppy, the Afghan hound that disgraced South Korean cloning pioneer Hwang Woo Suk claimed to be the world's first cloned dog, is indeed a genuine clone, according to evidence published in the March 9 issue of Nature.
To support its claims that the original research by B.C. Lee and colleagues was genuine, the Seoul National University (SNU) Investigation Committee provided data from DNA analysis of blood samples from Snuppy, the nuclear DNA donor (Tai) and the surrogate mother, as well as analysis of the oocyte donor's lung tissue. The authors conclude that "it is virtually certain that Snuppy was generated from somatic-cell nuclear transfer, as claimed by Lee, et al."
The findings are also supported by similar experiments conducted by a team of U.S. researchers led by Elaine Ostrander, Ph.D., of the National Institutes of Health's National Human Genome Research Institute, using samples supplied by SNU.
"These data are consistent with Snuppy being a genetic clone of the donor dog Tai. Our analysis rules out most feasible alternatives to a true clone, such as the production of a delayed twin, which would have produced dogs with the same mitochondrial D-loop sequence, or an animal resulting from extreme inbreeding, which would have yielded dogs that were homozygous at more than the observed eight loci," the U.S. researchers write.
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