1. Welcome to modern plant cloning Unlike the old fashioned way of cloning a plant, which involved taking a cutting and encouraging it to turn into a new plant, at Life Technologies we have developed a more effective way of cloning plants in the lab. Using a technique called tissue culture we can create thousands of identical new plants from one piece of plant tissue.

2. We take a few cells from the plant you want to clone, we then place them in a petri dish and stimulate them with plant hormones. We can create thousands of identical plants from just a few cells. Unlike the old fashioned method of taking a cutting, which can only produce a few new plants from the original one.

3. For hundreds of years farmers have been cloning plants. By taking cuttings of their most productive plants farmers can quickly produce several genetically identical plants. This is far cheaper then modern tissue culture methods cloning.

4. First you take a cutting by removing a small piece of the plant. You only need to take part of the stem or just part of a leaf. By using our range of hormone rooting powders then keeping the plant under the right conditions you can create several genetically identical plants.

5. Increase your best livestock As a farmer you’ll have one or two cows that produce more milk than any of the others. Her offspring will most likely inherit that attractive characteristic, but you’ll know that in her working life she’ll probably only produce 8-10 calves. But, even though it may seem quite expensive, using our cloning technology she can produce that number of calves in a year!

6. How does it work? You give your best cow fertility hormones so that she produces lots of eggs. You then remove these eggs from her uterus and we take them back to our lab. We fertilise one of the eggs with sperm from one of our best bulls to create an embryo. Once the embryo starts dividing we split it up into several smaller embryos. We implant these embryos into the uteruses of other cows. These have been given hormones to get them ready for pregnancy and they act as hosts for the growing embryos.

7. The cows give birth to several genetically identical calves, they are all clones of each other. These cloned embryos can be transported all around the world and can be taken to places where cows which produce a lot of milk are needed.

8. T HE FUTURE OF CLONING You’ve seen it in science fiction, but could you one day create a clone of yourself? We aim to make that a reality. In 1997 scientists successfully created a clone of an adult sheep, they named her ‘Dolly’. But she was the only success from hundreds of failed (and expensive) attempts. But with our on going research we are trying to make it easier.

9. T HE FUTURE OF CLONING So how can we clone an adult? Lets use Dolly the sheep as an example. First we take a sample of cells from the sheep we want to clone. In those cells is a nucleus, this contains DNA, the genetic information for creating that sheep. We remove the DNA from the nucleus. From a different sheep, we take an egg. We remove the DNA from the nucleus of the egg and replace it with the DNA of the sheep we want to clone. We give it a small electric shock to start it dividing. We then implant the egg with the new DNA into the uterus of a host sheep who acts as a foster mother, she then gives birth to a lamb that’s a clone of the original sheep.

10. T HE FUTURE OF CLONING