(Original title: Cloned pigs created by robots were born in Tianjin) After a long wait of more than two months, a special "Parental Test" report was recently published. 13 cloned pigs were not related to "surrogate" mothers and only had "parent-child relationship" with donor cells. This medically proves that the world's first robot-operated somatic cell clone pig was born in Tianjin. After 110 days of gestation, on April 26 and 29, two ordinary “surrogate†sows had successfully produced 13 healthy purebred landraces. The "Robots Operate Somatic Cell Cloning Pigs" study came from the cross-disciplinary research team led by Prof. Zhao Xin from the Institute of Robotics, Nankai University. Tianjin Institute of Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Medicine is the main cooperative unit. Somatic cell cloning is one of the classical methods for improving biological species. It will remove the nuclei of the common varieties of oocytes and inject them into the somatic cells of the superior varieties. The advantage of this method is that the offspring obtained must be good varieties. However, the success rate of manual operations is extremely low. In response to this problem, the Nankai University research team developed an in-situ microscopic analysis and operation instrument with visualization, minimally invasive, fixed-point, and quantitative functions, integrating detection and analysis and operation, and using this instrument to realize robotization. Nuclear transfer process. According to reports, the key difficulty of robotic micro-operation-based somatic cell cloning technology lies in how to minimize the damage to cells. Through the analysis of the cell forces in the process of micro-manipulation tools and cell contact, the researchers achieved the minimum force-based cell toning and pumping, which ensured that the cell forces during cell nuclear transfer were minimal. When the cells were manually manipulated, the cells were deformed to a maximum of 30 to 40 μm. After calculation, the maximum deformation of the robot-operated cells was reduced to 10 μm to 15 μm. The experimental results showed that the cell toss method based on minimal force significantly reduced the damage to the cells; subsequent cell culture showed that compared with the manual operation, the cell development rate based on minimal force was significantly higher in the subsequent cell development rate. Zhao Xin said: "Our research for the first time guided the micromanipulation from the point of view of the cell's development and established a link between the micromanipulation process and the cell development results through cell stress. The promotion of this method can further improve the micromanipulation technology to the whole biological process. It is expected that there will be good prospects for application in areas such as assisted reproduction, plant and animal species improvement, and popular medical care and livestock production."