GIBH Scientists and their collaborators have made a major breakthrough in the generation of cloned pigs from iPSCs

Embryonic stem (ES) cells are powerful tools for generating genetically modified animals that can assist in advancing our knowledge of mammalian physiology and disease. Pigs provide outstanding models of human genetic diseases due to the striking similarities to human anatomy, physiology and genetics. Therefore, generating induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from pigs has been the subject to the attention of scientists around the world. However, due to the lack of understanding to the mechanisms of iPSCs research, it is proven a very big challenge to clone pigs using iPSCs. Recently, this scientific puzzle has been solved by research groups led by Dr Liangxue Lai (GIBH), Dr Lei Xiao (University of Zhe Jiang) and Dr Yutao Du (Genomic Institute). Their findings have been published on line on the 18th of Dec 2012 in Cell Research.

This scientific breakthrough has been made under the leadership of academician Prof Ning Li from China Agricultural University, and more than 10 Institutes were involved in the project across China. Their work demonstrated that pig iPSCs can be used as donors for nuclear transfer if the exogenous transcription factors are silenced through differentiation or by adding a histone deacetylase inhibitor to the embryos. This is the first report about a live mammal rather than the mouse derived from iPSCs with nuclear transfer. In the future, this discovery may facilitate the generation of genetically modified pigs after gene targeting of the pig iPSCs. The latter could represent an efficient way to produce genetically engineered pigs.