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Tag: Cloning

  • Dupont Circle lab helps everyone from hobbyists to nurseries clone their plants – WTOP News

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    A look inside the D.C. facility that’s building the “shovels and picks” for plant tissue culturing and teaching hobbyists how to grow their own plants in test tubes.

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    DC lab is helping everyone, from hobbyists to nurseries, clone their plants

    A lab that’s just a few floors above Dupont Circle Metro Station may be responsible for that favorite succulent or money tree in your home.

    WTOP went inside the facility that is building the “shovels and picks” for plant tissue culturing and teaching hobbyists how to grow their own plants in test tubes.

    “What tissue culture is, at its simplest, is we’re growing plants in sugar, instead of plants in soil,” said Yoni Kalin the CEO of Plant Cell Technology.

    Whether they propagate the plant in a nutrient rich gel or their new more efficient bio rector, it allows nurseries to clone their bestselling plants. All they need is that nutrient-rich compound and a little bit of light.

    “You go to a Home Depot, if you go to a Trader Joe’s, where do those plants come from? Fun fact, they’re all clones or a lot of them are clones,” Kalin said.

    This type of technology is also why we can get fresh fruit and vegetables out of season all year long.

    “When you eat blueberries in July, or you buy blueberries in September, they all taste the same. Why is that? Because they’re all clones,” Kalin said. “They’re all coming from the same mother plant.”

    It allows these producers to give grocery store shoppers roughly the same size, same flavor and same nutritional composition every time.

    “That’s the beauty of tissue culture,” Kalin said.

    He added that this technology, which has been around for decades can also save crops from being wiped out by pests, flood or other disaster. These tissue culture plants can act like an “cloud” backup for farmers.

    Beyond selling to professional nurseries, farms and research universities they also sell and provide education for hobbyists.

    It’s a mission to involve more and more people in this field of plant science. Hobbyists can get a starter kit for $120 and create their own tissue cultures of plants they found outside or even their favorite orchid or cactus.

    “If we can provide this tool to the masses. That means, hey, if somebody is a carnivorous plant lover, they’re going to focus on carnivorous plant conservation. If somebody is an orchid lover, they’re going to focus on orchid conservation,” Kalin said. “We’re caretakers of the earth species.”

    The small lab in Dupont Circle can be seen in videos across YouTube where they have dozens and dozens of videos explaining how to make their own tissue culturing lab equipment or focus on culturing specific plant species like peace lilies and even cannabis.

    “Back in 2019 and 2020, you’d go on YouTube, and you might see somebody talking about plant physiology on a whiteboard, but you wouldn’t be able to actually watch somebody in a lab subculturing a plant,” Kalin said.

    They also offer online or in-person master classes.

    “We have one customer who came to our class, and he had this vision of building a plant tissue culture lab. He showed us pictures of his lab, and now he’s one of the largest suppliers of clones in the industry,” Kalin said.

    “The house plants that you buy at Home Depot or plant shops that you buy and kill … We can teach you how to keep them alive, and we can teach you how to grow thousands of them.”

    WTOP went inside the facility that is building the “shovels and picks” for plant tissue culturing and teaching hobbyists how to grow their own plants in test tubes.
    (WTOP/Luke Lukert)

    WTOP/Luke Lukert

    researcher in plant lab
    A lab above the Dupont Circle Metro Station may be responsible for that favorite succulent or money tree in your home.
    (WTOP/Luke Lukert)

    WTOP/Luke Lukert

    Whether they propagate the plant in a nutrient rich gel or their new more efficient bio rector, it allows nurseries to clone their bestselling plants. All they need is that nutrient-rich compound and a little bit of light.
    Whether they propagate the plant in a nutrient rich gel or their new more efficient bio rector, it allows nurseries to clone their bestselling plants. All they need is that nutrient-rich compound and a little bit of light.
    (WTOP/Luke Lukert)

    WTOP/Luke Lukert

    This type of technology is also why we can get fresh fruit and vegetables out of season all year long.
    This type of technology is also why we can get fresh fruit and vegetables out of season all year long.
    (WTOP/Luke Lukert)

    WTOP/Luke Lukert

    It allows these producers to give grocery store shoppers roughly the same size, same flavor and same nutritional composition every time.
    It allows these producers to give grocery store shoppers roughly the same size, same flavor and same nutritional composition every time.
    (WTOP/Luke Lukert)

    WTOP/Luke Lukert

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    Luke Lukert

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  • Thousands of People Are Cloning Their Dead Pets. This Is the Woman They Call First

    Thousands of People Are Cloning Their Dead Pets. This Is the Woman They Call First

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    Nine years ago, a pair of freshly weaned British longhair kittens boarded a private plane in Virginia and flew to their new home in Europe. These kittens were no different than any other, except that they’d been created in a lab. They were clones: genetically identical to their predecessor, now sadly deceased.

    It had taken seven months and cost $50,000, but that cat was one of the first pets to be commercially cloned in the United States. Since then, a couple thousand dog, cat, and horse clones have followed, and every year the waiting list grows longer. Of course it does. Haven’t you ever wished your pet could live, if not forever, then at least as long as you? Now it can, sort of.

    WIRED spoke to a longtime customer service manager for the largest commercial pet cloning company. She guides pet owners through the entire process, from when they send in a piece of the old pet to when they meet—remeet?—the new one.

    Half of our clients come to us after their pet has passed away. They’re mourning. They’re trying to figure out a way to cope with the grief, so they Google “What do you do when your pet passes?” That’s when they stumble across us, and I’m often the first person they talk to. There’s a lot of emotion. I’m happy to hold their hand through the process, because when a pet dies, especially if it’s sudden, many people are not thinking straight. Postmortem, things have to be done very quickly.

    After a pet has passed, the cells are viable for about five days. The body has to be refrigerated, but not frozen, because freezing damages the cells. Typically we would want a piece of the ear from the deceased pet. The ear tissue is hardy; it works very well. People don’t want to think about their pet missing part of their ear, so that is sometimes a struggle.

    Once the sample is at the lab, the first step is to grow cells in culture from the tissue, then freeze and store those cells. When everyone is ready to move forward with cloning, we transfer some of those cells to our cloning lab in upstate New York.

    The cloning begins with making embryos from the cells. We take a donor egg, remove the nucleus, and insert one of the millions of cells that we’ve grown. There’s an electric stimulus that basically tricks the egg into thinking it’s been fertilized, but there’s no sperm. That’s the magic of cloning. It takes a lot of skill and good hand-eye coordination.

    The lab will create several embryos, then they transfer those embryos into one of our surrogate dogs or cats, which are specifically bred to be great mothers. Within a few tries, we’ll have a puppy or a kitten. Sometimes more than one puppy or kitten, because when we transfer the embryos into the surrogate, it’s kind of like IVF—more than one might take. If two or three puppies are born, the client would get them all. On rare occasions we have a client who only wants one, so then we help place the extra. A lot of times it goes to an employee here. Almost every one of our employees has a cloned animal.

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    Camille Bromley

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  • Rick Scott Celebrates Abortion Ban By Cutting Umbilical Cord Of Woman Forced To Carry Baby To Term

    Rick Scott Celebrates Abortion Ban By Cutting Umbilical Cord Of Woman Forced To Carry Baby To Term

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  • Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Creating Massive Franken-Sheep With Cloned Animal Parts

    Montana Man Pleads Guilty to Creating Massive Franken-Sheep With Cloned Animal Parts

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    An 80-year-old man in Montana pleaded guilty Tuesday to two felony wildlife crimes involving his plan to let paying customers hunt sheep on private ranches. But these weren’t just any old sheep. They were “massive hybrid sheep” created by illegally importing animal parts from central Asia, cloning the sheep, and then breeding an enormous hybrid species.

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    Arthur “Jack” Schubarth, 80, owns and operates the 215-acre “alternative livestock” ranch in Vaughn, Montana where he started this operation in 2013, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. Alternative livestock includes hybrids of mountain sheep, mountain goats, and other large mammals which are often used for trophy hunting by wealthy people.

    An unnamed accomplice of Schubart kicked off the decade-long scheme by illegally bringing biological tissue from a Marco Polo sheep, the largest sheep in the world, from Kyrgyzstan into the U.S. in 2013, according to prosecutors.

    How big are these sheep? An average male can weigh over 300 pounds with horns over 5 feet wide, giving them the largest sheep horns on the planet. The sheep are endangered and protected by both international treaties and U.S. law. Montana also forbids the import of these foreign sheep or their parts in an effort to protect local American sheep from disease.

    Once Schubart had smuggled his sheep parts into the U.S., he sent them to an unnamed lab which created 165 cloned embryos, according to the DOJ.

    “Schubarth then implanted the embryos in ewes on his ranch, resulting in a single, pure genetic male Marco Polo argali that he named ‘Montana Mountain King’ or MMK,” federal authorities wrote in a press release.

    By the time Schubart had his Montana Mountain King he used the cloned sheep’s semen to artificially impregnate female sheep, creating hybrid animals. The goal, as the DOJ explains it, was to create these massive new sheep that could then be used for sports hunting on large ranches. Schubart also forged veterinarian inspection certificates to transport the new hybrid sheep under false pretenses, and sometimes even sold semen from his Montana Mountain King to other breeders in the U.S.

    Schubart sent 15 artificially inseminated sheep to Minnesota in 2018 and sold 37 straws of Montana Mountain King’s semen to someone in Texas, according to an indictment filed last month. Schubart also offered to sell an offspring of the Montana Mountain King, dubbed the Montana Black Magic, to someone in Texas for $10,000.

    Discussions between Schubart and an unnamed person apparently included what to call this new breed of sheep they were creating. The other person said another co-conspirator had suggested the name “Black Argali,” though noting “we can’t,” presumably because it would give away the fact that these sheep were descended from the argali species.

    Schubart pleaded guilty to violating the Lacey Act, and conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act, which makes it a crime to acquire, transport or sell wildlife in contravention of federal law.

    “This was an audacious scheme to create massive hybrid sheep species to be sold and hunted as trophies,” assistant Attorney General Todd Kim from the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division said in a press release.

    “In pursuit of this scheme, Schubarth violated international law and the Lacey Act, both of which protect the viability and health of native populations of animals,” Kim continued.

    Schubart conspired with at least five other people who are not named in the indictment. Schubarth faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 and is scheduled to be sentenced by Chief U.S. District Court Judge Brian M. Morris for the District of Montana in July.

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    Matt Novak

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