After Dolly the Sheep Comes Snuppy the Puppy

Scientists have finally broken the hound barrier - they have cloned an Afghan puppy called Snuppy from the skin cells of a three-year-old male hound.

The breakthrough ends a seven-year worldwide race to replicate a dog from donor cells using the technique pioneered by British scientists when they cloned Dolly the sheep in 1998. Within weeks of Dolly's birth, a US millionaire gave $5m to a Texas university to duplicate a mongrel dog called Missy. The project became known as Missyplicity.

Over the years researchers in various laboratories cloned more sheep, piglets, mice, rabbits, cows, rats and mules. A US biotech company launched itself under the name Genetic Savings and Clone and cloned a procession of pet cats on demand. But attempts to duplicate a dog seemed to go nowhere.

Now, Woo Suk Hwang, of Seoul National University, who led the team that last year produced the world's first cloned human embryo, reports in today's Nature that he and colleagues took a scrap of skin from the ear of an Afghan hound and cultured the skin cells in a laboratory dish. Then they extracted the DNA from a single cell and injected it into an egg from which the female DNA had been removed, so that any successful puppy would have one parent, not two.

Cloning success rates are never high. The researchers implanted more than 1,000 embryos into 123 bitches to achieve just three pregnancies. One foetus miscarried. The second was born but died of pneumonia. But the third, Snuppy, so named because he was born at Seoul National University, emerged from a Labrador retriever at a normal weight of 530 grams (18.7oz), and grew at a healthy rate.

The research could help breeders sort out why some breeds of dogs have bad backs, bad eyesight and bad tempers, and others are prone to disease. Freda Scott-Park, who becomes the president of the British Veterinary Association this autumn, said the report showed how fast the world of genetic manipulation was moving.

"Sadly, however, the media interest is likely to attract pet owners keen to recreate their much-loved pets, although this demand is unlikely to be met until the efficiency of cloning is raised," she said. "Cloning of animals raises many ethical and moral issues that have still to be properly debated within the profession."