Re: SciAm Dec. 2003 - DNA, Epigenetics, and Complexity

["Jeff Pridaux" <***>]

The following experiment might be interesting:

As I understand it, for animals cloned so far, the DNA from a viable egg
cell is replaced with DNA from another cell (from the same animal) in such
a way to "trick" the egg to think it was fertilized.  It may be that the
whole nucleus is swapped out of the egg.  Then the animal (or a like
animal) carries the fertilized egg to term resulting in a clone of the
animal (who donated the DNA)

An interesting alternative would be to have the donor egg and the replacing
DNA being from different animals.  And somehow just swap out the DNA
without swapping out the surrounding chemicals around the DNA in the
nucleus.  If that were possible and if an animal resulted that wasn't
exactly the same as the DNA donor, then that would demonstrate that the DNA
isn't EVERYTHING.

I suspect, though, that this experiment may be very difficult (or maybe
impossible) to perform.


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