Researchers in China announced their progress in developing a process to fully clone pigs using robots. This progress could help the world's largest pork consumer reduce its dependence on imported pigs.
In March 2022, a sow gave birth to seven cloned piglets at the College of Artificial Intelligence at Nankai University in Tianjin, China.
"Each step of the cloning process is automated, and involves absolutely no human operation," said Liu Yaowei, a member of the team that developed the system, quoted by the South China Morning Post.
Liu added that the use of robots has also increased the success rate of the cloning process, as it is less likely to damage cells during a complicated cloning process. Previously, this problem was an obstacle to the wider use of the technique.
"If successful, this automated system can be developed into a cloning kit that can be purchased by any company or research institute, eliminating the need for scientists to perform time-consuming manual cloning," said Pan Dengke, a former researcher at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences who helped manufacture the first cloned pig in China in 2005.
Pig cloning process
The most common technique for cloning viable embryos in the laboratory is called somatic cell nuclear transfer. This process is laborious and time consuming and needs to be done under a microscope.
It takes the last egg (oocyte) and body cell (somatic cell) taken from the animal to clone. The researchers then removed the nucleus from the egg, which could come from another animal, and replaced it with the nucleus from the body's cells.
In 2017, a team from Nankai University produced the world's first piglet cloned using a robot. But in this first attempt, several parts of the cloning process, including removal of the nucleus of the egg, still had to be done by humans.
Since then, the research team improved their control algorithm and are now able to clone completely automatically.
"A peer-reviewed paper will soon appear in the Engineering journal to report technical details," said Liu.
In the past five years, the team has also been able to increase the success rate of developing cloned embryos from 21% to 27.5%, compared to the 10% success rate for manual surgery.
"Our AI-powered system can calculate the tension in the cell and direct the robot to use minimal force to complete the cloning process, which reduces cell damage caused by human hands," he added.
Liu hopes this progress can make high-quality hog stocks more widely available in China, and can even help the country become self-sustaining amid fears of the vulnerability of import restrictions from the US and other Western countries.
Pan said cloning techniques using robots, as well as the broader science of cell micro-manipulation, could be applied to various applications in animal husbandry, including reproduction and selective breeding.
"We look forward to the commercialization of robot cloning, which will no doubt have a profound and profound influence on industry and the lives of the general public," he concluded.