Thread:Jurassic Park Treasury/@comment-11047508-20130610075940/@comment-3213993-20130610083217

It's about a few things related to nuclear transfer and the chimera method.

1. As we all know, the whole animal rights thing about not being able to clone egg-laying animals is bovine dung. However, in a TED talk about de-extinction, a professional developmental biologist is also skeptical of cloning birds. According to him, the yolk is one big cell, and extracting the nucleus is difficult. He says that he has tried to do somatic cell nuclear transfer in chickens, and has failed. I don't know if he's heard of the chicken-rabbit transfer though, so he could be wrong.

2. To create a dino-bird chimera, you need a dinosaur early-stage embryo to take cells from, or at least have some dino cells. The problem is, we only have DNA, chromosomes and a cell nucleus. If it is possible to clone birds, then I'm sure we could raise a dinosaur blastocyst in an ostrich egg and then culture it in a dish, but what if we can't clone birds? Could we take ostrich (non-egg) cells and then replace the genome inside with the dinosaur genome? Scientists have replaced genomes in bacterial cells, but what about multi-celled vertebrates?