Cloning bulls

[knabe]

if these animals were so great, why do they not have offspring that are as good or better?  When I was growing up, I used to hear breeders talk about prepotent sires, that is, sires that would produce one or more sons better than they were themselves. I hardly ever hear anyone talk about this today. Are there no sires capable of doing this, or has the word " prepotent" just became redundant?

prepotent was a marketing gimmick.  it was probably just heterosis.  really, the best reason for cloning from semen or any other source, is to protect genetic diversity as breed leaders are doing their best to keep moving "forward" to narrow the gene pool.  we have no current system to understand or introgress anything other than prefixes in a pedigree.  this push to eliminate most diversity before we even begin to understand it is extremely short sighted.

 

[librarian]

My dim understanding of heredity suggests that the enduring features of an animal are stored in the female DNA while male DNA is an arrow of variability, shot across changing landscapes at a moving fitness target.
Or a spear, genetically sharp or dull, flung with circumstantial force and accuracy at the herd.... adjusting for range, wind, slope, temperature.......
Perhaps, as a thought experiment, it would be more informative to clone great bull making cows, inseminate them with a volley of great bulls, and move forward by selecting among the progeny.
And/or let the clone herds run with their F1 sons from the initial seeding in a natural service survival of the fittest free for all.

 

[librarian]

And I'm not sure why, but I feel that we have a perspective on adaptation that is derived from our western concept of time.
There are "primitive" cultures where the future is perceived to be approaching from behind as one faces the past. Because we cannot see the future, it is not what we move toward, it moves toward us from our blind side.
Life does not change in to, but changes away from. Or maintains briefly.
For the "primitive", looking always over ones shoulder into the future is futile---there is nothing to see.
Similarly, I believe DNA has a primitive point of view and operates with it's back to the future. Cloning moves us toward a form already floating downstream, diminishing from view.

 

[knabe]

Cloning is swimming upstream affording use rather than losing it to the ocean. A lot of mistakes were made in the 70's.

 

[librarian]

Fair enough, there are people in New Guinea that understand the future to be uphill and the past downhill.
But cloning seems crude compared to something like the Uruz project I was reading about:
From Wikipedia:
The Uruz Project aims to breed an aurochs-like breed of cattle from a limited number of carefully selected primitive cattle breeds with known Aurochs characteristics. The project uses Sayaguesa cattle, Maremmana primitiva or Hungarian grey cattle, Chianina and Watusi. The DNA of the Aurochs has been completely reconstructed and serves as the baseline for the reconstruction of the Aurochs.[4][8]
The project plans to use aurochs DNA data to evaluate breeding results and genome editing, a new field of science, to eliminate wrong genes so that characteristics that are not aurochs-specific will not inherit and return in later generations.

Genome editing? Does that mean they could have just a dish of cells from The Great Bull and just SNP around with it?

But about the aurochs, which I need in order to test the milk for my butterfat hypothesis....I wish they could clone one from the horn of the last aurochs, died 1620, although I don't think the right cloning stuff can be extracted from a horn.

Bottom photo: A first-generation Tauros bull named “Manolo Uno,” who is a cross between an Italian Maremmana primitivo bull and a Spanish Pajuna cow. / Courtesy Staffan Widstrand and Rewilding Europe.

 

[knabe]

I guess one could snp around and revive all sorts of exting species.

Should be relatively easy to do at done point.

We should be freeze banking all sorts of animals.

Forget Jurassic, park, we should be saving what we have.

 

[cowpoke]

Meyer 734 was unique in that his picture wasn't what made him famous.His offspring from the right kind of Angus cows was where he really worked.His color pattern,horns,and performance fiqures made many Sim breeders not use him as much or not at all.Then when semen and possession became an issue he really took off.There are a few bulls that have became famous even if their TH/or/PHA status are positive in that they have produced progency that excelled.In the club calf world EPDs W.W/.Y.W./ M.M./ B.W.,and frame size that purebred base their program are not needed as much as the look and hair quality.Cloning isn't cheap but has been used successfully by some.It has been proven they sire the same.

 

[DLD]

Club calf bulls may not ever really get the chance to produce a son that breeds better than themselves because most of their phenotypically better sons end up as steers, not as herd bulls.  Likely the only reason Full Throttle didn't get cut was his older (by 2 years) brother, Takin' Names, produced a great first calf crop.  Takin' Names didn't get cut because he was injured (hip knocked down) as a baby and wasn't going to make a show steer, so he was left a bull.  That used to be the mentality throughout the club calf industry - never leave a good one a bull.  Now that almost everybody that's been any way associated with showing steers is trying their hand at raising them, and selling bulls and semen is as big a deal as selling show steers themselves, a whole lot more of the better ones are being kept for bulls.  But along with all that came the mega-marketing of semen, and clones - genetic progress in the club calf industry has practically reached a standstill.  We continue to refine our product, and to create a bigger pool, but it's all the same stuff over and over.  Whether the future lies ahead or is sneaking up from behind, it's not moving like it should, IMHO.

 

[librarian]

Okay. I think the aurochs had lousy dispositions anyway.

If someone has really got to clone a Shorthorn, how about Coronet Max Leader, or Catalyst 20th, or Weston Trademark, or President 26A....something sound with good carcass quality.
The second picture is 26A. Are there any other photos of him? He does not look full grown in this picture.
Max Leader weighed over 2400 lbs, that surprises me.

For the record, I still think cloning will only proliferate a new set of mistakes by re-application of poor judgement to good genetics....but maybe not.

 

[knabe]

The mistake rate probably won't change.

 

[Bulldaddy]

My point is that if any given bull is generations ahead, then why isn't there a son that is as good or even better to replace him and expand his impact on the industry even further?  For years I have looked at AI catalogs and saw sires considered to be " the best ever". A few of them have sons that follow them, but there are many who don't. If this is so, were these bulls actually as good as they were reported to be?

Sons would be like human siblings, some similar characteristics but all different, like most of us who have brothers and sisters.  Cloning would give you an exact copy of the original only to be affected by the environment in which it is developed.

 

[Tallcool1]

Perhaps, as a thought experiment, it would be more informative to clone great bull making cows, inseminate them with a volley of great bulls, and move forward by selecting among the progeny.

Isn't that what Embryo Transplanting is?  Why clone a cow when you can flush her and get 25 eggs and fertilize them with a "volley of great bulls".  I believe this is being done already.

 

 

[Tallcool1]

Okay. I think the aurochs had lousy dispositions anyway.

If someone has really got to clone a Shorthorn, how about Coronet Max Leader, or Catalyst 20th, or Weston Trademark, or President 26A....something sound with good carcass quality.
The second picture is 26A. Are there any other photos of him? He does not look full grown in this picture.
Max Leader weighed over 2400 lbs, that surprises me.

For the record, I still think cloning will only proliferate a new set of mistakes by re-application of poor judgement to good genetics....but maybe not.

I have read your posts for quite some time.  I enjoy your unique point of view and thought process when you post about genetics and such.

To be clear, am I understanding you to say that cloning is actually a step in the wrong direction?  I am not questioning if that is an accurate or inaccurate summation.  I just want to be sure that I am understanding.

 

[librarian]

Yes, my personal, very subjective, philosophy is that cloning takes us in the wrong direction.
Mostly because of my interest in paleo-ecology and the idea that life is impelled to change over time with environment.
I think cloning ignores all the fine print in the genetic code, the invisible interactions that determine individuality.

Stephen J Gould's first book, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, got me thinking about all this.

 

[knabe]

Please describe the metrics of moving in the right direction?


Cloning merely makes available bulls you seem to cherish.

 

[librarian]

I know, knabe, but living with an animal that came from ghost semen has made me think a lot about this. Those animals were the product of a time we cannot bring back. I think we should work with what we've got and maybe select for some traits that those animals had, but not re-create them.

 

[Tallcool1]

I know, knabe, but living with an animal that came from ghost semen has made me think a lot about this. Those animals were the product of a time we cannot bring back. I think we should work with what we've got and maybe select for some traits that those animals had, but not re-create them.

Interesting.

 

[knabe]

I know, knabe, but living with an animal that came from ghost semen has made me think a lot about this. Those animals were the product of a time we cannot bring back. I think we should work with what we've got and maybe select for some traits that those animals had, but not re-create them.

rubbish.


we can bring them back.  why try and breed out all the crap we have bred into them since the 70's like stiff pasterns, straight legs, lack of milk, lack of survival etc in quite a few cattle.  it's easier to go back to the cattle that were ignored because they weren't frame score 10 and make selections from them.  really, all the "good" we've gained since the 70's is allowing marketing hype to change everything to black, and decouple birth weight and yearling weights.  we still have birth weight problems from over-selection on birth weight. cloning allows rapid restarting where we went wrong as well as preserving genetic diversity we know nothing about.  this constant drumbeat of "moving forward" is nothing more than a communist chant to eliminate diversity.

 

[DakotaCow]

I have been quietly watching this post seeing where it would go and I must ask, if cloning an old sire from the long lost past is simply a step in the wrong direction would it then be prudent to throw away all semen on a bull when he dies? Is it not the same? You have to realize the beef industry is so diverse that bulls that some may go gaga for I would love to cut and so on. You wont find many of kit pharo's genetic in my part of the world but that doesnt make it wrong they exist. Compare that to the poultry industry....or even pork. To think that using a cloned bull from the 80s is going to topple the beef industry is foolish.

 

[librarian]

If you can clone bulls from frozen semen, and I'm not 100% sure you can, why hasn't anyone cloned some of the old greats?  If you have semen in the tank from an old deceased bull, and for discussions sake, let's say the owner is deceased also, would it be legal to have that bull cloned?  Provided of course you had a bucket of money you wanted to spend.

I had to think about this overnight and remind myself what the original question was.
If we could clone from Great Old Bull semen, would that take us in the "wrong direction".
No. As knabe points out, a restart could give us the advantage of hindsight and we could avoid many dysfunctional traits that have been the consequence of selection for extremes.
My general belief in the utility of locally adapted strains of cattle that can be out crossed to other locally adapted strains could benefit from such a restart.
As tall cool says, ET seems to serve the same purpose if we use old semen with functionality hard wired in on a population of eggs collected from a cow that carries the environmental programming we aspire to restart in.
This could work, especially in small herds managed by very observant and experienced breeders.
Without a breeders eye for functionality and commitment to maintaining the strain, I don't see how the genes would remain confined.
My reservations are purely superstitious. By using 50 year old genetics in my program, such as it is, and being naive to the business, I have the benefit of all kinds of un-messed up characteristics, which I take for granted because it's all I know. BUT, every time I attempt to double up on the old stuff I head into pudville. So how far back is far enough?
My best results have come from mixing that gene pool with the Galloway gene pool, which has been maintained by common sense, stubbornness and frugality. Within those parameters anything can work.