Steer Planet - Show Steers and Club Calves Forum

This topic has amused , intrigued and bewildered me for a while now.......  Full disclosure have not bred with clones myself, just doing some ai ing this year to get mama cows for club calves for my kids when they get old enough in a few years.

So Heat Wave is 2-300 per straw when you can find it.    HW 2 is 100 or so, and subsequent clones after him are less........   The reason being that "clones don't breed exactly true".  Or something similar.

I am no idiot when it comes to genetics.  I understand the minute difference genetically in clones due to mitochondrial DNA,   I also understand the idea of epigenetics, that the animals environment will somewhat alter what genes get expressed to what degree. Yadda  yadda

But isn't meiosis which creates the sperm, only nuclear DNA,   And isn't it nuclear DNA that is extracted and used to create the clone?

In the field trial and hunt test world of labrador retrievers that I have been In for several years now there is a dog named lean Mac.  A great dog that has thrown many great pups.  The heat wave of the retriever world.   To start with he got used A LOT.  Mostly with top level females because of the stud fee, not gonna spend the increased stud fee on a POS female.   So he got bred to lots of good dogs, no coincidence, he threw lots of good pups,    More people sought him out, stud fee went up,  now he was only getting bred to great females, so  pups were more expensive only going to serious homes, more likely to have every chance to succeed......   No that he is dead and limited semen left, only elite females get him, and can name the price for the pups and they only go to SERIOUS people.    So is lean Mac really that much better of stud then his sons or is it the other factors?

My theory is the same is true for heat wave vs clones (and other cloned bulls).  Perhaps the reason the clones "don't breed true" is because they are not being bred to the same level of females.    If I am going to shell out. 2-300 for a straw of semen, it is going to be for a flush quality cow.   And because of that the are going to be differences on the cow side, plus there are going to be a few more calves per breeding to choose from so if 1-2 doesn't turn out as well not as big of deal cause. There are the one or two rock stars in the flush that people talk about.     On the flip side, a thirty dollars straw of semen forma clone might get put in a more ordinary cow, and throw a nice calf, the type that made heat waves  reputation to start with, but not the 50 k calf that people are seeing out of the flushes to the original that go to people that are going to do everything possible to make sure the calf works out.

So my question is do clones really not breed true, which from the biology side I see as improbable, or is it a case of higher priced semen going into higher quality cows and the resulting calves going to deeper pocketed homes?

Would be interesting to flush a cow to heat wave, store the eggs, flush same cow to a clone put all the eggs in to a similar group of recipes nd see if people can sort em out....

But isn't meiosis which creates the sperm, only nuclear DNA,   And isn't it nuclear DNA that is extracted and used to create the clone?

Yes, nuclear cell is used to create the clone. When a clone is DNA tested it will test exact match to original.

and another

http://www.viagen.com/

^ very true. I have more semen issues with clones than originals,.

Oh lordy...how I miss our old lean mac!  He was given as a tip to my dad when he was guiding a hunt for a nice older couple when he was still doing that.  He was flown from Maine to st Louis.  That guy was old, but he was a good dog while we had him.  He had gotten his Canadian and American supreme retriever(whatever the highest deal is, it has been a while since we did that) for both field trials and hunt tests.  Ur had the whole list of letters after his name.  Ended up getting renal failure, and I did fluids and all the drugs for 3 years and kept him alive and happy as ever.  Poor guy finally died at 13 after 3 years of treatments, but he knew when it was time to get his mere and fluids...he'd walk n the house right to his spot by the iv bag and wait.    Our honest abe was just as good! He was a great hunting dog and family dog.  The honest abe was much prettier though, lol.  Sorry you got me thinking about them two!...its all good though, I hadn't in a while

I know when they first started cloning horses the issue came up that they wouldn't ever be performance horses like the originals because of the health weakness of being a clone(don't remember all the details its been awhile)...so I'd say you could expect a lower performance in sperm production and quality.  why aren't these ppl cloning these great bulls and then cutting the calves to be sold as show steers...or even cloning these hard core show steers?  I realize cloning is very expensive, but people would pay big time for a show calf that had the identical genetics that had already won a major? Has anyone cloned any big time donors yet?

I think you've hit the nailed on the head with the semen price, quality of cows, etc.  Another thing to probably add to that list is that we see difference in calves of original Heatwave and Heatwave 1208945 because the type of cows we keep, breed and run are different than they were 10 years ago.  I'm looking at a picture of a heifer that sits on my desk from 10 years ago who was one of the deepest heifers shown that year and now she just fits in with the crowd.

Quote from: Limiman12 on June 21, 2012, 04:04:44 PM

Would be interesting to flush a cow to heat wave, store the eggs, flush same cow to a clone put all the eggs in to a similar group of recipes nd see if people can sort em out....

I think this is the greatest argument of all. how many full sibs are just as good as each other? why does a clone get judged if their calf isn't as good as the original? it's hard to get those genetics to line up right twice. that's when you know you have something special when they do.

Another excellent point! 

This topic has amused , intrigued and bewildered me for a while now.......  Full disclosure have not bred with clones myself, just doing some ai ing this year to get mama cows for club calves for my kids when they get old enough in a few years.

So Heat Wave is 2-300 per straw when you can find it.    HW 2 is 100 or so, and subsequent clones after him are less........   The reason being that "clones don't breed exactly true".  Or something similar.

I am no idiot when it comes to genetics.  I understand the minute difference genetically in clones due to mitochondrial DNA,   I also understand the idea of epigenetics, that the animals environment will somewhat alter what genes get expressed to what degree. Yadda  yadda

But isn't meiosis which creates the sperm, only nuclear DNA,   And isn't it nuclear DNA that is extracted and used to create the clone?

In the field trial and hunt test world of labrador retrievers that I have been In for several years now there is a dog named lean Mac.  A great dog that has thrown many great pups.  The heat wave of the retriever world.   To start with he got used A LOT.  Mostly with top level females because of the stud fee, not gonna spend the increased stud fee on a POS female.   So he got bred to lots of good dogs, no coincidence, he threw lots of good pups,    More people sought him out, stud fee went up,  now he was only getting bred to great females, so  pups were more expensive only going to serious homes, more likely to have every chance to succeed......   No that he is dead and limited semen left, only elite females get him, and can name the price for the pups and they only go to SERIOUS people.    So is lean Mac really that much better of stud then his sons or is it the other factors?

My theory is the same is true for heat wave vs clones (and other cloned bulls).  Perhaps the reason the clones "don't breed true" is because they are not being bred to the same level of females.    If I am going to shell out. 2-300 for a straw of semen, it is going to be for a flush quality cow.   And because of that the are going to be differences on the cow side, plus there are going to be a few more calves per breeding to choose from so if 1-2 doesn't turn out as well not as big of deal cause. There are the one or two rock stars in the flush that people talk about.     On the flip side, a thirty dollars straw of semen forma clone might get put in a more ordinary cow, and throw a nice calf, the type that made heat waves  reputation to start with, but not the 50 k calf that people are seeing out of the flushes to the original that go to people that are going to do everything possible to make sure the calf works out.

So my question is do clones really not breed true, which from the biology side I see as improbable, or is it a case of higher priced semen going into higher quality cows and the resulting calves going to deeper pocketed homes?

You have a really big hole in your theory/analogy. "Mac" the dog was bred to superior females from the get go. Because he had a high stud fee from the beginning, he was always mated only to good females, then his stud fee got higher, the quality of females got better and thus  did the puppies. But that's not the case with Heat Wave. Heat Wave was $25 a unit FOR YEARS. He was bred to everything from great ones to sale barn cows. The reason his semen went up was a) he quit producing, but b) because be produced more of what was desired than other $25 bulls did. At first he was used on a broad sample of cows, much like his lower priced clones now. Very different from Mac being bred only to good females to begin with.  And he out produced other bulls, thats why there are so many clones, to keep up with semen demand. So the theory about he is good because his semen is expensive and he only gets bred to good cows is not sound. It would be sound for those bulls that are syndicated and used on a much more controlled, smaller sample of cows. But not on Heat Wave.

Heat Wave semen is $300 because some one will pay that much for it, I have no idea why. You could give me all the anecdotal evidence and stories of this "original" Heat Wave calf being better than that Heat Wave clone. But over a large enough sample, the results of breeding the original and the clone would be the same. Period. The end.