China successfully uses a robot to clone pigs

Researchers in China have successfully developed a pig cloning process using robots shutterstock

South China Morning Post On June 2, it was reported that researchers in China successfully developed the process Replication pig is completely equal to robot. In March, a surrogate mother gave birth to seven piglets at the School of Artificial Intelligence of Nankai University in Tianjin, China.

“Every step of the cloning process is automated and there is no human involvement,” said Liu Yaowei, a member of the system development team.

The use of robots has also increased the success rate of the cloning process, as the robot does less damage to cells while performing the process, Liu said.

Pan Dengke, a former researcher with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the man who created the country’s first cloned pig in 2005, said that if it works, the automated system can can be developed into a cloning kit that any company or research institution can purchase to free scientists from laborious and time consuming manual cloning.

In 2017, Nankai University’s research team created the first piglets on world cloned by robots. Still, Mr. Liu said some parts of the process – including the removal of the egg cell nucleus – still had to be done by humans.

Since then, the team has improved the control algorithms and they can now do the entire process automatically.

The technical details will be reported soon in a peer-reviewed post in the journal Engineering, Mr. Liu said.

Over the past five years, the team of scientists was also able to increase the success rate of cloned embryo development from 21% to 27.5%, Liu said. This rate for manual operations is 10%.

“Our AI system is able to calculate the tension in the cell and direct the robot to use minimal force to complete the cloning process, helping to reduce the cell damage experienced during manual cloning,” said Dr. Science Liu said.

Mr. Liu also hopes that these advances can help make high-quality pork more widely available in China, the world’s largest pork consumer. This achievement could even help China become self-sufficient in the face of concerns about being affected by import restrictions from the US and other Western countries.