Somatic Cloning and Epigenetic Reprogramming in Mammals

More than 50 years ago, Briggs and King (1952) showed that normal hatched tadpoles could be obtained after transplanting the nucleus of a blastula cell into the enucleated egg of the amphibian Rana pipiens. However, while cloning with embryonic cells resulted in normal offspring, development became more and more restricted when cells from more differentiated stages of development were employed (Briggs and King, 1952). This led to the hypothesis that the closer the nuclear donor is developmentally to early embryonic stages the more successful nuclear transfer is likely to be. This concept prevailed for many years (Gurdon and Byrne, 2003).