Human Cloning (Geek-Alert)

[azraphael]

So I was sitting at a night-club with some friends this evening discussing literature while the Burlesque performers were practicing getting their pasties gyrating in unison back stage.

Both my friend and I had read all of Heinlein's Lazarus Long stories, however his girl-friend had never heard of them. We covered some of the back-plot including

Comments

[azraphael]

I wasn't proposing sequencing the chromosomes. Steps 2 and 3 would use a technique similar to Gel Eletrophoresis. Here's how it goes! After extracting the 15 nucleus from the spermatozoa, you have 345 chromosomes. Statistics dictate (to a probability of 99.93%) that you will have all 46 chromosomes of your donor present. The problem is they are all in one lump.

It turns out that the masses of the 23 chromosomes are relative to the number of total bases in the chromosome. As these masses vary by at least 0.6% between each chromosome-pair, the 23 chromosome pairs should separate out quite nicely in the Electrophoresis stage.

Now you have 23 blobs, each of which contain 15 chromosomes. Statistically (to a probability of 99.997%) you should find both copies of each chromosome. The trick at this stage is you want to separate the copies so you can grab one of each. As the masses of the chromosomes would be quite close, this may take numerous Electrophoresis stages to get enough physical separation.

So what you've done is take a single blob of 345 chromosomes, separated it once into 23 blobs containing 15 chromosome pairs, then separated once more getting 46 blobs each containing at least one copy of the 46 donor chromosomes.

Technically the steps above would work for female DNA. When working with male DNA the X and Y sex chromosomes have vastly different masses; therefore the first round of Electrophoresis would separate these producing 24 chromosome blobs (22 autosomal and 2 sexual). You would then only need to do a second stage separation on the 22 autosomal.

The only remaining step is to pick a single chromosome from each chromosome blob and you'll have the exact set of 46 chromosomes present in the donor but in a Demethylated state ready for insertion and zygote production.