THE US: Scientists at Texas A&M University have produced what they believe is the first cloned deer, the college said on Monday.
Although the animal was born earlier in the year, the university waited until Christmas week to make its announcement.
It said tests had confirmed that a fawn named Dewey born to a surrogate mother in May was a genetic duplicate of a male white-tailed deer from southern Texas whose skin samples were used in the cloning process.
Photographs posted on the Texas A&M Internet site showed the little grey deer standing in a patch of grass, Reuters reported yesterday.
"Dewey is developing normally for a fawn his age and appears healthy," said Dr Mark Westhusin, who was lead investigator on the project.
Even though white-tailed deer are abundant in the wild, Dr Westhusin said in a statement that the creation of Dewey could prove helpful in preserving endangered species such as the Key Westdeer of Florida.
Texas A&M, located in College Station, 90 miles northwest of Houston, said it was the first academic institution to have cloned five different species.
Its scientists have also cloned cattle, goats, pigs and a cat using techniques pioneered in Scotland where the first cloned sheep was created.
Dolly the sheep became a scientific sensation when her birth was announced in Scotland in 1997. At the Roslin Institute, Edinburgh, scientists replaced the nucleus of the egg cell with the nucleus from the parent cell - in Dolly's case, an udder cell. Somehow, the egg cell reprogrammed the donated DNA contained within its new nucleus, and Dolly was the result.
The manipulation was done using microscopic needles, a method pioneered in human fertility treatments in the 1970s. The resulting embryo was implanted into the womb of a third, surrogate sheep. Dolly was born on July 5th, 1996, and her birth was announced in early 1997.
Her relatively early death in February 2003 fuelled the de- bate about the ethics of cloning research and the long-term health of clones. She died on February 14th, 2003, when scientists at the institute decided that Dolly should be put down. She had been suffering from a progressive lung disease.