X-Message-Number: 28309 From: Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2006 15:33:07 EDT Subject: Re: Freezing Pig embryos Dr. Prather's team overcame the obstacles to freezing swine embryos by first removing lipids from unfertilized eggs before fertilizing them with muscle cells from a male pig containing modified genetic material. The resulting embryos were then frozen at the blastocyst stage. Huh? This sounds more like cloning. An egg contains one set of genes and is fertilized by a sperm, also with one set, giving the fertilized egg two sets, as required. But a muscle cell would contain two sets itself, so if it "fertilized" a regular egg the egg would have three sets of genes, which does not work. In cloning the egg's nucleus with its one set is removed and replaced by a normal nucleus from a regular cell with two sets, giving the egg the two sets it needs. So -- what did they do here? Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=28309