Chinese researchers from the University of Nankai have reportedly come up with a way to clone pigs entirely via the use of robots – which could potentially signal the rise of automated cloning of animals moving forward.
The feat was successfully accomplished when a surrogate sow located in the university managed to birth seven cloned pigs back in March this year. “Each step of the cloning process was automated, and no human operation was involved,” said Liu Yaowei, who contributed to the development of the system and process.
Previously, the university had successfully managed to produce piglets cloned using robots, except that many parts of the process still involved humans, and by relation, a higher margin of error.