Chinese Scientists Use A.I. for First Batch of Cloned Pigs

A group of researchers from Nankai University's College of Artificial Intelligence developed a fully automated method for creating pig clones.

In March, a surrogate mother gave birth to seven healthy cloned pigs without any human involvement using the same method for the first time.

China is currently the world's largest producer and consumer of pork.

Pork consumption in the country is between 30 and 35 kg per capita, with a pig population of over 400 million.

Pork accounts for a large portion of the meat consumed in China, and the country's available supply is never enough to meet demand.

This is why China must import millions of tons of expensive pig meat yearly; in fact, China purchased 3.31 million metric tons of pork in 2021 alone.

One of the researchers at Nankai University in China, Liu Yaowei, believed that their AI-powered automated pig cloning method can significantly boost China's pig population and make the pork-production in the country self-sufficient.

Automated Swine Clones vs. Lab-Grown Pork

Pork from pig clones is not the same as lab-grown meat, which is produced from cultured cells prepared under laboratory conditions.

The former, on the other hand, is made from real swine cells.

However, it is important to point out that cloned animal cells can also be used to produce lab-grown meat.

Animal or pig cloning methods currently in use require human interference at various stages.

This increases the risk of cloning errors and introduces a whole slew of challenges.

For example, a popular animal cloning method known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) needs a human to remove the nucleus from an animal's egg cell and replace it with a somatic cell, which is capable of producing any tissue to facilitate cloning.

Due to human interference, the delicate cells are damaged most of the time or contaminated during the process.

Physical Strains of Cloning

Pan Dengke, a Chinese agricultural scientist who developed the method for cloning pigs with robots, previously used SCNT to create thousands of pig clones.

Dengke suffered from severe back pain as a result of the difficulties and physical challenges he faced during the procedure.

He believed that the new AI-based automated pig cloning method has the potential to transform the industry, Interesting Engineering reported.

In 2017, a team at Nankai University utilized robots to clone pigs, but the process required participants.

According to researcher Yaowei, the success rate of robotic pig cloning is much higher than that of human-operated pig cloning.

During the process, they made no mistakes nor did they damage the cells.

So they developed a fully automated cloning process that didn't require any human involvement this time.

Yaowei went on to say that their AI-powered system can calculate the strain within a cell and prompt the robot to complete the cloning procedure with minimal force, reducing the cell damage caused by human hands.

Furthermore, because the automated process does not require any manual interaction, it spares the researchers the physical strain that traditional cloning methods entailed.

The specifics of this AI-based cloning method have yet to be released in a study.

Nonetheless, the researchers claimed that if their method is successfully implemented, it will help China boost pork production and expand animal cloning strategies around the world.