nuclear transfer

nuclear transfer, the introduction of the nucleus from a cell into an enucleated egg cell (an egg cell that has had its own nucleus removed). This can be accomplished through fusion of the cell to the egg or through the direct removal of the nucleus from the cell and the subsequent transplantation of that nucleus into the enucleated egg cell. The donor nucleus used for nuclear transfer may come from an undifferentiated embryonic cell or from a differentiated adult cell (somatic cell); in the latter case, the technique is called somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).

The concept of nuclear transfer was first conceived in 1928 by German embryologist Hans Spemann, who initially experimented with transferring salamander embryonic cell nuclei into egg cells. A decade later Spemann proposed the idea of generating clones through the transfer of nuclei from differentiated cells into enucleated egg cells, though he never carried out the experiment. At the time, Spemann considered the procedure technically impossible, because the microsurgical tools necessary to remove nuclei from cells without causing damage to the genetic material or to egg cells did not exist. Furthermore, the generation of an organism from nuclear transfer of differentiated cells was suspect, because only totipotent cells, which have the ability to differentiate into any type of cell in the body, were believed to be capable of guiding embryonic development. However, in the 1950s American scientists Robert Briggs and Thomas King successfully cloned tadpoles using nuclear transfer of frog blastula cells, which have lost some of their totipotent properties. Later that decade British developmental biologist John B. Gurdon generated cloned tadpoles from differentiated frog intestinal cell nuclei. Gurdon’s experiments demonstrated that egg cells were able to undifferentiate previously differentiated nuclei, although the mechanism by which this process occurred was not known. (For his discoveries, Gurdon was awarded a share of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.)

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Ian Wilmut: Nuclear transfer

In the 1990s British developmental biologist Ian Wilmut and his team of scientists at Roslin Institute in Scotland used nuclear transfer to produce sheep clones, the best known of which was the Finn Dorset sheep Dolly, born in 1996. Dolly was created through cell fusion and nuclear transfer of a differentiated cell and an enucleated egg cell. This research stimulated renewed interest in the ability of egg cells to reprogram differentiated nuclei. The technique used to generate Dolly inspired the development of SCNT, which has become an important technique in stem cell research and in understanding the cellular mechanisms controlling embryonic development and nuclear reprogramming.