Polly and Molly

Polly and Molly (born 1997), two ewes, were the first mammals to have been successfully cloned from an adult somatic cell and to be transgenic animals at the same time. This is not to be confused with Dolly the Sheep, the first animal to be successfully cloned from an adult somatic cell where there was no genetic modification carried out on the adult donor nucleus. Polly and Molly, like Dolly the Sheep, were cloned at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The creation of Polly and Molly built on the somatic nuclear transfer experiments that led to the cloning of Dolly the Sheep. The crucial difference was that in creating Polly and Molly, scientists used cells into which a new gene had been inserted. The gene chosen was a therapeutic protein to demonstrate the potential of such recombinant DNA technology combined with animal cloning. This could hopefully be used to produce pharmacological and therapeutic proteins to treat human diseases. The protein in question was the human blood clotting factor IX. Another difference from Dolly the Sheep was the source cell type of the nucleus that was transferred. In the case of Dolly the Sheep, the nucleus that was transferred came from mammary gland cells from a 6-year-old ewe; in the case of Polly and Molly, fibroblast cells were used.

Prior to the production of Polly and Molly, the only demonstrated way to make a transgenic animal was by microinjection of DNA into the pronuclei of fertilized oocytes (eggs). However, only a small proportion of the animals will integrate the injected DNA into their genome. In the rare cases that they do integrate this new genetic information, the pattern of expression of the injected transgene's protein due to the random integration is very variable. As the aim of such research is to produce an animal that expresses a particular protein in high levels in, for example, its milk, microinjection is a very costly procedure that does not usually produce the desired animal.

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