
Chad S. answered 05/14/19
Bachelor's in Biochemistry and Master's in Business Administration
Dolly was the end result of a long research program funded by the British government at the Roslin Institute in Scotland. This used the technique of somatic cell nuclear transfer, where the cell nucleus from an adult cell is transferred into an unfertilized oocyte that has had its nucleus removed. The hybrid cell is then stimulated to divide by an electric shock, and the blastocyst that is eventually produced is implanted in a surrogate mother.
Dolly’s white face was one of the first signs that she was a clone because if she was genetically related to her surrogate mother, she would have had a black face.
Because Dolly’s DNA came from a mammary gland cell, she was named after the country singer Dolly Parton.
Dolly was important because she was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell. Her birth proved that specialised cells could be used to create an exact copy of the animal they came from. This knowledge changed what scientists thought was possible and opened up a lot of possibilities in biology and medicine, including the development of personalised stem cells known as iPS cells.
However, Dolly was not the first ever cloned mammal. That honour belongs to another sheep which was cloned from an embryo cell and born in 1984 in Cambridge, UK. Two other sheep, Megan and Morag, had also been cloned from embryonic cells grown in the lab at The Roslin Institute in 1995 and six other sheep, cloned from embryonic and foetal cells, were born at Roslin at the same time as Dolly. What made Dolly so special was that she had been made from an adult cell, which no-one at the time thought was possible.