His company, Catalina Equine, has now cloned more than 80 horses at its 80-hectare property on the banks of the Hawkesbury River, just outside of Sydney.<\/p>\n
It’s one of only two commercial animal cloning operations in Australia, and among just a handful of businesses around the world making genetic copies of horses, agricultural animals and even pets.<\/p>\n
How to clone a horse<\/p>\n
Cloning a mammal from an adult cell sample was first achieved in 1996 with the birth of Dolly the sheep in Scotland.<\/p>\n
The cloning technique is known as somatic cell nuclear transfer.<\/p>\n
The nucleus, which contains an organism’s genetic blueprint, is taken from the animal you want to clone and placed into a different animal’s egg cell, which has had its own nucleus removed.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Dolly the sheep’s taxidermied body has been on display in the National Museum of Scotland since 2003. (Flickr: Tom Magliery<\/a>, Dolly<\/a>, CC BY-NC -SA 2.0<\/a>)<\/p>\n This is turned into an embryo, which is implanted in a surrogate mother that then gives birth to a genetic copy \u2014 or clone \u2014 <\/strong>of the original donor animal.<\/p>\n In horses, it takes about 11 months of gestation before a foal is born.<\/p>\n The first-ever cloned horse, a Haflinger breed named Prometea, was birthed in Italy in 2003. Horse cloning soon became popular at the highest levels of international polo in countries like Argentina and the US.<\/p>\n Argentinian polo player Adolfo Cambiaso infamously rode six clones of his champion horse, Cuartetera, in the same match in 2016. And a six-month-old clone of the same horse once fetched a reported $US800,000 ($1.2 million) at auction.<\/p>\n Argentinian polo player Adolfo Cambiaso at a 2017 match in Buenos Aires. (Getty Images: Marcelo Endelli)<\/p>\n The first horse cloned in Australia, born in 2018<\/a>, was a collaboration between local and Argentinian institutions.<\/p>\n What other animals are cloned in Australia?<\/p>\n Close to 60 animal species have been cloned around the world<\/a>, from frogs to monkeys.<\/p>\n In Australia, sheep and cows were among the first.<\/p>\n Richard Fry, founder of the company Speed Breed, has cloned about 50 animals, mostly cattle, since 1992.<\/p>\n “It’s still a very niche market because the thing about cloning is that you don’t actually improve the genetics,” he said.<\/p>\n “Sometimes it might be because someone has bought the last live Brahmans into Australia, and so they want to keep those genetics going.<\/p>\n “It might be the best dairy Holstein in Australia \u2014 <\/strong>we’ve made four copies of that cow.”<\/p>\n While only a few cows have been cloned in Australia, mostly for breeding purposes, it is likely beef or milk products from their young have been consumed by the public.<\/p>\n Food Standards Australia New Zealand, the regulator for food products in both countries, doesn’t have any extra regulations for cloned animals.<\/p>\n Cow cloning costs about $15,000, but Dr Fry is also involved in “genetic protection packages” where cells from top-of-the-line cattle are frozen and stored.<\/p>\n Akin to an insurance policy against disaster and disease if your herd was wiped out, it allows you to rebuild with the genetics of a $200,000 animal.<\/p>\n Dr Fry and Catalina have also separately acted as intermediaries for people who want to clone their pets overseas, by culturing and storing biopsies.<\/p>\n Loading…<\/p>\n There are currently no pet cloning businesses in Australia.<\/p>\n But <\/strong>commercial and larger-scale animal cloning, including for pets, is taking place in countries like China, the US, Argentina, Canada, Brazil and South Korea. Viagen, an American company, charges $US50,000 ($76,000) to clone a cat or a dog.<\/p>\n Why cloning hasn’t fully taken off<\/p>\n Although advancements have been made since Dolly the sheep was cloned, the process is still inefficient.<\/p>\n In trying to make Dolly, scientists created 277 embryos, 29 of which were successfully implanted into surrogates, but only one of which went full term.<\/p>\n Dr Fry said for most species, the success rate\u00a0for cloning was about 1 to 2 per cent from the collection of eggs right through to the birth of a healthy animal.<\/p>\n “In cattle it’s actually a fair bit better: 5 to 20 per cent.”<\/p>\n Mr Farren-Price said Catalina had a 60 per cent success rate of transferring a cloned embryo into surrogate mares.<\/p>\n “Then you lose about 10 per cent [of those embryos] following transfer at about 45 days,”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n he said.<\/p>\n Besides breeding inefficiencies, there have also been concerns about whether clones live a shorter life than regular animals. Dolly the sheep died at the age of 6 from a progressive lung disease, and had also developed arthritis.<\/p>\n But evolutionary ecologist Russell Bonduriansky, from the University of New South Wales, said we still didn’t know a lot about what happens to clones as they grow older.<\/p>\n “There is some remarkable research coming out of Japan on mice, where mice that have been cloned over multiple generations \u2026 seem to have normal longevity,<\/strong>” he said.<\/p>\n “More generally, we still don’t really understand the issues around ageing with cloning.”<\/p>\n Research in 2017 also showed Dolly did not necessarily age prematurely nor develop arthritis just because she was a clone<\/a>. Further clones of Dolly also lived much longer.<\/p>\n Meet Retro, the longest surviving cloned rhesus monkey<\/a><\/p>\n Scientists have successfully cloned a monkey using a technique that most famously gave us Dolly the sheep in 1996.<\/p>\n And Prometea, the first-ever cloned horse from Italy, is still alive and well, and turned 22 in May. Her breed lives, on average, 25 to 30 years.<\/p>\n “There’s still a great deal that we haven’t solved yet but I think a lot of progress has been made,” Professor Bonduriansky said.<\/p>\n So much that he thinks it is inevitable there will soon be attempts to clone humans, despite the practice being banned worldwide (apart from limited stem cell therapy studies).<\/p>\n “Now that we can clone all these other mammals, including monkeys, there’s nothing stopping somebody from cloning humans,” Professor Bonduriansky said.<\/p>\n “Of course, this raises a lot of ethical issues. But the technology exists.”<\/p>\n How ‘identical’ are cloned animals?<\/p>\n While it may be technically possible to clone a human, there’s still plenty of fine-tuning and improvements to be made when cloning animals like horses.<\/p>\n A major hurdle in Catalina’s early days was sourcing horse egg cells. In other international operations, these egg cells are collected from euthanased horses at abattoirs.<\/p>\n Catalina instead has a stable of female horses which are “flushed” once a month to collect eggs, in a process similar to what happens in human IVF procedures.<\/p>\n “It was two years to build the technology and transfer the embryos and get a foal on the ground,” Mr Farren-Price said.<\/p>\n Although the price can vary, generally Catalina now charges about $50,000 to clone a horse.<\/p>\n Catalina Equine founder John Farren-Price with Maximilian, the first clone of a polo horse named Rex. (ABC Science: James Bullen)<\/p>\n And four years ago, the company finally made a clone of Easter. Her name is Samsara.<\/p>\n She is following in the footsteps of her genetic twin, and being coached to fulfil the unmet expectations of her predecessor.<\/p>\n “She can hopefully do what the original was going to do,” Mr Farren-Price said.<\/p>\n There are 15 clones at the property at the moment, including six of the same horse: Rex.<\/p>\n Six clones of a polo horse named Rex have been created, including this young pony, the fifth clone, named Charlemagne. (ABC Science: James Bullen)<\/p>\n When Victorian polo player Ben Kay first sat on Rex, who is now 8 years old, he knew there was something special about the New Zealand-born horse: “He’s super fast, super agile and just very strong.”<\/p>\n Eventually, there will be nine clones of Rex.<\/p>\n While clones are genetically identical, just like identical twins, their appearance and other subtle traits can differ.<\/p>\n Genes will be expressed differently sometimes because of, for instance, genetic mutations or environmental factors.<\/p>\n “If you start to drill down on things like \u2026 the colouring of their face, they’re all unique,”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Mr Farren-Price said.<\/p>\n There’s no guarantee all the Rex clones will be champion polo horses, and it will be another five or six years until their owners know for sure.<\/p>\n But Mr Kay is hoping the horses will have the same calm temperament as the original Rex.<\/p>\n “John seems to think they’re all pretty similar. He knows his clones better than me and he’s very impressed by the way they’ve turned out,” he said.<\/p>\n Listen to the<\/strong> full episode of Artificial Evolution about the proliferation of cloning and its future<\/strong><\/a>, and <\/strong>follow the podcast for more<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Easter showed potential as a polo horse. Born from a former winner at the top level of Australian…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":195619,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[108863,108857,108856,108855,108851,108862,108853,108861,815,719,108848,108850,108849,108858,108860,108859,159,108852,67,132,68,108854],"class_list":{"0":"post-195618","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-genetics","8":"tag-animal-science","9":"tag-can-i-clone-a-cat-in-australia","10":"tag-can-i-clone-a-dog-in-australia","11":"tag-can-i-clone-a-pet-in-australia","12":"tag-catalina-equine","13":"tag-cloning","14":"tag-cloning-in-australia","15":"tag-dolly-the-sheep","16":"tag-genetics","17":"tag-horse","18":"tag-horse-cloning","19":"tag-horse-cloning-for-polo","20":"tag-how-do-you-clone-a-horse","21":"tag-how-much-do-clones-cost","22":"tag-is-cloning-illegal-in-australia","23":"tag-is-cloning-legal-in-australia","24":"tag-science","25":"tag-speed-breed","26":"tag-united-states","27":"tag-unitedstates","28":"tag-us","29":"tag-what-can-you-clone-in-australia"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195618\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
Year<\/strong>Select cloning milestones in Australia and abroad<\/strong><\/tr>\n \n 1958<\/td>\n First instance of an adult cell being used to clone an animal, in this case a frog in the UK.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 1996<\/td>\n Dolly the sheep is the first mammal cloned using somatic cell nuclear transfer.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 1997<\/td>\n A cow is cloned using the same technique as with Dolly.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 2000<\/td>\n A merino ewe clone named Matilda and a calf dubbed Suzi are born in Australia.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 2001<\/td>\n Australia’s first cloned pig is born and a cat is cloned in the US.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 2003<\/td>\n The first horse is cloned in Italy.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 2005<\/td>\n A dog is cloned in South Korea.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 2017<\/td>\n Two monkeys, crab-eating macaques, are cloned in China.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 2018<\/td>\n A horse is cloned in Australia through a collaboration with Argentinian institutions.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n <\/p>\n
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