I wish they had more information in this piece but I found it to be a very interesting story.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/living/2009/12/18/gif2.hero.dogs.legacy.cnn

I guess it raises a couple questions in my mind. White spots on the chest? floppy ears? hmm...

I thought clones would look atleast as close as identical twins. I'm with you Malissa. The two with the large white patches on the chest raise questions in my mind. A white patch on a young puppy might disappear, or become less noticable as he grows. These pups are adolescents. But not only do I see no white markings in the same area on the original, but the other cloned pups don't have the same markings. Even the two with patches, don't have the same shape and size of marking.

Even the guy that did the Missyplicity project said that they noticed some differences that they couldn't quite account for. Like slightly wavey coats, one with a slight coat curl, but I haven't heard any reasoning as to the why that is.

To me it raised a big flag on our understanding that we couldn't possibly get from other animal projects. After all we wouldn't notice these kinds of details on a cloned pig or cow.

 Quote: joy van veen

I thought clones would look atleast as close as identical twins.

This is a common misconception of the cloning process.

Cloning creates an individual that is genetically identical, not necessarily identical in appearance, temperament, etc. For example, some genes have to be "activated" in order to be expressed in the appearance of an animal. Cloning cannot dictate which genes activate and which do not.

See: http://www.cvm.tamu.edu/news/releases/2002/cloned_cat/cat_clone.shtml
And: a picture of the cat and her clone as a kitten

I thought the differences in CC had more to due with the calico gene than anything else. It's a rather random color pattern with the black and orange but if you look at the pictures of the orignal cat http://scienceblogs.com/clock/upload/2006/07/cloned%20cat%20Rainbow_&_cc_&_Allie2.jpg the color pattern with the spots is pretty spot on (pardon the pun).

I'm just boggled on the white chest spots because well... it's not really a normal appearance in any GSDs I've seen.

I guess I don't know enough about gene expression,timing, and how it ties to gene activation because since the genes were taken from an adult animal where all these activations had already taken place I would think alot of this would be set already. It was the reasoning I thought was behind Dolly's premature aging.

 Quote: jasmine dillon

 Quote: joy van veen

I thought clones would look atleast as close as identical twins.

This is a common misconception of the cloning process.

Cloning creates an individual that is genetically identical, not necessarily identical in appearance, temperament, etc. For example, some genes have to be "activated" in order to be expressed in the appearance of an animal. Cloning cannot dictate which genes activate and which do not.

See: http://www.cvm.tamu.edu/news/releases/2002/cloned_cat/cat_clone.shtml
And: a picture of the cat and her clone as a kitten

so clones would be more like brothers and sisters than exact replications?

 Quote: Dennis Jones

so clones would be more like brothers and sisters than exact replications?

Well, I would have to say they are more like exact replications because their DNA is identical, whereas brothers and sisters generally do not have identical DNA. Their expression of said DNA may be different which means to the eye, they would appear to be more like brothers and sisters than exact replications.

Just as a note, I'm no expert. I'm just an animal science major and have taken both a reproductive physiology course and a genetics course where we went into fairly great detail about cloning amongst other such procedures.

As far as calico goes, well you may know that is sex-linked. But if my memory serves me right, it not only depends on the animal to be female but also has to be activated in each position. The thing is that gene activation can be influenced by different things which are not controlled by the genotype of the animal (i.e. hormones).

Here's another picture of the cats, this time with the kitten full grown and a better view of their sides: http://scienceblogs.com/biotech/Rainbow%26CloneCc.jpg
I agree Melissa, the patterns are pretty similar between the two and I liked the pun, lol.

This site goes into a little more detail about the logistics of it all in a short paragraph:
http://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/Cloned_Cat.html

 Quote: Melissa Thom

I'm just boggled on the white chest spots because well... it's not really a normal appearance in any GSDs I've seen.

I wondered about that too! But I'm not familiar with how the spotting gene works so I'd have to talk to someone who knew more about it than I did. I actually have a friend I think I'm going to ask about that the next time I see her...she's studying Genetics in grad school so would know much, much, much more about any of that than I do.

 Quote: Melissa Thom

... since the genes were taken from an adult animal where all these activations had already taken place I would think alot of this would be set already. It was the reasoning I thought was behind Dolly's premature aging.

My naive thoughts in response to this are that some of the expression of these genes depends upon how things progress during development. Since the animal has to develop and is not cloned into an adult, certain things such as color expression and spotting are affected.

Note: There are some calico male cats but it is my understanding that they are technically hermaphrodites.

It really is amazing how much biology has changed since I started school. My major was forestry so I'm much better with the technicalities of trees than mammals. It amazes me how fast my information gets out of date compared to my dad's soil science stuff. ^.^

You're right on calico being sex linked. It's why it's impossible for there to be a normal male calico. It's because Orange is carried on one X and black is carried on the second one. Male calicos are normally XXY.

I guess the part two followup to this is how many of these dogs end up with the training that made the original Trackr and if the success record matches with the batch of drug sniffing Toppy labs in Korea cloned from a pretty highly regarded Canadian dog.

Whoop for ag majors! Hehe.

 Quote: Melissa Thom

I guess the part two followup to this is how many of these dogs end up with the training that made the original Trackr and if the success record matches with the batch of drug sniffing Toppy labs in Korea cloned from a pretty highly regarded Canadian dog.

I think that will be really interesting to see!