Males more prone to cloning

Prone to cloning???...It's a guy thing...

Cloning researchers who wish to boost their success rates should try using male cells, researchers say. The advice is based on a new study which showed that mouse embryos created from male adult cells were more than three times as likely to develop to term as those created from female adult cells.

Cloning an adult animal usually involves putting the nucleus from an adult cell into an egg that has been stripped of its chromosomes. However, progress has been hindered by the fact that "reprogramming" adult nuclei in this way has very low success rates.

To get around this problem, a team led by Peter Mombaerts and Elaine Fuchs at Rockefeller University in New York, US, tried using adult skin stem cells, which are less differentiated and so should be easier to reprogram.

The success rate was still very low, but they did find that 5.4% of embryos created from male cells developed to term, compared with 1.6% for comparable cells from females.
More tests are now needed to confirm whether this sex bias holds true for other cell types.

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