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What does somatic cell nuclear transfer involve?

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Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) is a technique in which the nucleus of a somatic (body) cell is transferred into an enucleated egg—an egg cell from which the original nucleus has been removed.12

Once the somatic nucleus is inside the egg, cytoplasmic factors reprogram it to function as a zygote nucleus. The resulting embryo can be developed to the blastocyst stage to create embryonic stem cells, or it can be implanted into a surrogate mother for reproductive cloning.1

This process was famously utilized by British biologist Ian Wilmut and his team at the Roslin Institute to produce Dolly the sheep in 1996, marking the first time a mammal was cloned from a differentiated adult cell. SCNT remains a vital tool in modern stem cell research and the study of nuclear reprogramming.12