Analysis Of Histopathology And Some Hematological Indexes In Cloned Pigs

Somatic cell cloning has been succeeded in some species，but some problem arisedat the same time. It was found in somatic cloned animals that the birth rate of clonedanimals was lower than the animals born of normal fertilization. Meanwhile, when thecloned animals are born, there would be some abnormal physiological phenotypes,including overweight, large placenta, high perinatal mortality, cardiopulmonarydysfunction and premature aging. So the health and safety of cloned animals havegradually been widespread concerned.Compared with the cloned cattle and the cloned sheep, the cloning of pig is moredifficult. Furthermore, few people studied the health and safety of cloned pigs. Theresearch about cloned pigs covered growth performance, reproductive performance,genetics, meat productivity and re-cloning, but pathology and hematology was rarelystudied.There are many advantages using fibroblasts as donor cells to produce clonedanimals. In this research, the donor cells were obtained from fetal fibroblast cells of aBama mini-pig and from skin fibroblast cells of an adult Fengjing pig. The pathologyand some hematological indexes of cloned Bama mini-pig were analysed in order tooffer reference in medicine about cloned animals.The main results were summarized asbelow：1. The methods of "electrical activation" and "electrical activation with chemicalactivation" were used for integration of the reconstructed embryos, and theirdevelopmental rates were compared. It showed that the fusion rate of the reconstructedembryos in Bama mini-pig was slightly higher than that of Fengjing pig, but thedifference was not significant. Both of fusion methods had no effect on thedevelopmental rate of reconstructed embryos. Whether the reconstructed embryos ofBama mini-pig or that of Fengjing pig, the fusion rate, cleavage rate and blastocyst rateof "electrical activation with chemical activation" group was higher than "electrical activation" group, but the difference was not significant.2. In this research, two surrogate sows aborted, two surrogate sows returned toestrus, a surrogate sow produced a Fengjing pig stillbirth after the expiration ofpregnancy, three surrogate sows produced three healthy cloned mini-pigs, a healthFengjing pig and a mummy stillbirth of mini-pig. In short, pregnancy rates reached75%,calving rate reached50%.3. Three dead cloned pigs have necropsy, and at which the abnormalities of heartand lung were serious. The performances of abnormalities included the heart withcompensatory cardiac hypertrophy and developmental abnormalities, the lung withedema, necrosis and serious suppurative inflammatory.4. In this study, the cloned pigs’ organs including heart, liver, spleen, lung, kidneywere observed by paraffin histology, and we found that five kinds of the cloned pigs’organizations had varying degrees of dysplasia.5. In this study, the cloned Bama mini-pigs in the same feeding conditions wereused as experimental subjects to measure a number of blood physiological andbiochemical indexes, and were compared to the common Bama mini-pigs. It showedthat the physiological and biochemical indexes were not significant differently in clonedBama mini-pig and common Bama mini-pig.