Dubai camel cloning caters to races, beauty pageants

Having led the world’s first cloning of camels in 2009, Nisar Wani is now replicating a few dozen a year at a Dubai lab – a big business in the Gulf region where camels are cherished and can earn huge sums in beauty and racing contests.
Wani said, “We collect these eggs from the ovaries of slaughtered animals. We have to mature them in the lab for 24 hours before they reach the stage where we can use them for the cloning process,” .
Reproductive cloning of animals uses a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer.
DNA is removed from a camel egg cell and replaced with DNA from a frozen body cell of a camel prized for some quality such as speed or beauty. The egg then develops into an embryo with no sperm needed.
Animal cloning is, however, time-consuming with low success rates.