No-Clone Zone: AQHA Postpones Cloning Decision (Again)

by Fran Jurga | 9 March 2009 | The Jurga Report at Equisearch.com

Clones are knocking on the door of the American Quarter Horse Association, seeking legitimate places in the largest breed registry in the world. "Go away! Come back next year!" came the cry from within at yesterday's AQHA committee meeting. (Fran Jurga/Puppet Tool software image)

Yesterday was billed as the Day of Decision at the annual convention of the American Quarter Horse Association in San Antonio, Texas. The issue: the AQHA's Stud Book and Registration Committee was scheduled to vote on the inclusion of clones (genetic replicas via engineered reproduction and DNA replacement) in the definition of an American Quarter Horse, opening the door for clones to be eligible for registration.

First reports from the San Antonio meeting indicate that a motion to postpone the decision for another year was passed by the committee. However, I believe the committee's recommendation needs the official stamp of the larger organization, as well as the appointment of a task force to further study the implications of registering clones, leading up to another airing at the 2010 AQHA Convention.

This story is not dead. Just like the late great Quarter horses who have been cloned, the story keeps having new life breathed into it. Over the past 10 years, the AQHA has progressed (or regressed, according to your political view) to allow frozen and fresh artificial insemination...then survived a lawsuit that opened the door to allow embryo transfer...and finally winds up with genetic clones on the doorstep of the registry office.

Clones may be the ultimate and most expensive "unwanted horses" in the universe, at least temporarily, when it comes to registration-paper legitimacy. That will surely change, even as multiple clones of champion cutting horse Smart Little Lena grow up in their "equus non grata" state of limbo. Other clones are replicas of favorite horses engineered for a fee for individual owners.

Clones are technically allowed to compete in cutting and reining, but the whole point of cloning Smart Little Lena or the mare Royal Blue Boon is not to compete, but to breed. And breed. And breed, thus infusing the breed with the bloodlines of champions who would otherwise have limited offspring. The number of foals sired by Smart Little Lena could be infinite in the future....as could be the number of exact genetic replicas of Smart Little Lena himself standing at stud all over the world!

Cloning is wonderful technology and yesterday's decision gives one hope that when the AQHA allows clones to join the registry--which surely seems inevitable--it will do it with a plan that is responsible and fair.

The much bigger story here is that once the AQHA allows cloning, other breed registries will surely follow suit. The framework and perhaps welfare of our entire horse world depends on the AQHA to lead the way, if it decides to, in a way that will encourage other breeds to be responsible in their policies and ensure the safety and welfare of horses and the viability of breeds and breeding.

You know what the critics are asking: Are we ready for offshore breeding laboratories, unauthorized DNA capture, and lawsuits over the implications of mitochondrial DNA? Are we entering the age of Dr. Frankenhorse or a new era of genetic analysis and engineering that may be able to better all breeds?

Something I've been wondering: Couldn't the cloned AQHA halter horses be manipulated so they have feet of proportionate size to their bodies?

If I was to give advice to the AQHA, I'd suggest that for every dollar a clone costs, an equal amount be put into research to predict, analyze and remove threats of genetic disorders from the breed. The same energy that figured out how to select a coat color for a clone could certainly go a long way on the health front. HYPP and HERDA may be only the tip of an iceberg, and those who want to register and breed clones should be responsible for any headaches and heartaches their engineered horses introduce to the bloodlines of the horses the rest of us just want to own and ride.

Stay tuned for more news!

Update: After this post was published, a press release from AQHA confirmed that the vote had been postponed to the 2010 convention and that a task force had been formed to continue to investigate how cloning might impact the breed, and vice versa. Click here to read the official announcement from the AQHA.

Send in the Clones: Forum on American Quarter Horse Clone Registration Rule Change Will Be Available via Webcast

One of the biggest changes in the history of American horse breeding has been set in motion, but you don't have to travel to San Antonio, Texas on March 6 to be part of it.

American Quarter Horse Association members who can’t make it to the equine cloning forum at the 2009 AQHA Annual Convention will be able to watch the event online in the members section of www.aqha.com. The forum Webcast will begin at 2 p.m. March 6.

You must be an AQHA member and have a Personal Identification Number to log in at the site and access the Webcast.

Under Rule 227(a) of the AQHA official handbook, a rule that became effective in 2004, American Quarter Horses produced by any cloning process are not eligible for registration. Clones are currently not being bred for performance use, but rather for breeding, so the offspring of a clone would not be able to registered.

All that may change in March.

The AQHA Stud Book and Registration Committee (SBRC) first considered a proposed change to Rule 227(a) at the 2008 AQHA Convention. That proposed change would allow a live foal produced via a particular type of cloning to be registered if its DNA matches that of a registered American Quarter Horse. Voting on that rule change was postponed to 2009 while more information was gathered.

The proposed change to Rule 227(a) will again be on the SBRC agenda at the 2009 AQHA Convention but only after a public forum where members will be able to learn more about cloning and to express their opinions. This forum is open to all interested AQHA members.

Confirmed forum panelists include Katrin Hinrichs, a veterinarian involved in equine cloning at Texas A&M University; Sharon Spier, an epidemiologist at the University of California-Davis; George Seidel, a professor specializing in biomedical sciences at Colorado State University; and Blake Russell of ViaGen, a commercial cloning lab.

Following the forum, AQHA members watching the webcast will have the opportunity to leave online comments on the information presented. Comments will be limited to 100 words and need to be related to the topics presented during the forum.

For more information on cloning, see the February issue of The American Quarter Horse Journal, the March issue of The American Quarter Horse Racing Journal and the March-April issue of America’s Horse.

Blogger's Note: My copy of the Journal came in the mail today and contained an eight-page article called "Pure Genetics", which covers many aspects of the cloning issue.

In 2008, the National Cutting Horse Association passed a rule allowing clones to compete. Champion cutting horse Smart Little Lena was cloned five times in 2006 by Texas A&M University, according to the AQHA article. Offspring sired by any of the five would currently not be eligible for registration with the AQHA, but would be able to compete in NCHA events. Might clones become part of a distinct new breed association?

After the AQHA convention in March, they might be welcome in the AQHA for the first time. Other breed associations would then need to decide whether to follow the AQHA's lead; currenty no breed associations register clones.

...And the White Horse You Rode in On: Genetics Research Unravels White Horse Code, Finds Suprises

This Lipizzaner foal at the Spanish Riding School's breeding farm in Piber, Austria, will soon start turning gray; he will eventually be almost white. As gray horses mature, their chances of developing melanoma, a form of skin cancer, can be as high as 75 percent. Swedish researchers found that gene regulation problems are common to all white horses and that they are all descended from a single, original white horse.

Sunday morning means reading as many newspapers as possible around here. It doesn't mean reading scientific journals, but when the Sunday papers are quoting the journal Nature Genetics for a study about horses, the keyboard goes back into action, especially when it had me thinking about equine icons.

Silver. Thunderhead. The Lippizaner stallions of the Spanish Riding School. Hirohito's white stallion. Desert Orchid. Milton. Abdullah. Snowman. Napoleon's Marengo. The list goes on and on. And let's not forget those white chalk horses cut into those British hillsides by the ancient horse worshippers. And that white horse your knight in shining armor is sure to be riding.

White horses are a symbol of something, we've never been quite sure what. Are they truly superior or just eyecatching? Is it saying something about the horse itself or is it what they say about the person riding them? Could Buffalo Bill Cody have ridden anything but a white horse? 

But if you have ever owned a white or "gray" horse, you may well know the worries of melanoma, a type of skin cancer that has become so common that about 75 percent of gray horses older than 15 years of age have a benign form of melanoma that in some cases develops into a malignant melanoma.

An international team led by researcher Leif Andersson, shown at left, at Uppsala University has now identified the mutation causing this spectacular trait and show that white horses carry an identical mutation that can be traced back to a common ancestor that lived thousands of years ago. The study is interesting for medical research since this mutation also enhances the risk for melanoma.

Here's some background: A "gray" horse is born dark (black, brown or chestnut) but the graying process starts as soon as the foal's first year and they are normally completely white by six to eight years of age. However, the skin remains pigmented. Thus, the process resembles graying in humans but the process is ultrafast in these horses. The research presented now demonstrates that all gray (white) horses carry exactly the same mutation which must have been inherited from a common ancestor that lived thousands of years ago.

That makes the Thoroughbred breed--descended from three Arabian stallions--look quite diverse, in comparison.

The study reported today has also given new insight in a molecular pathway that may lead to tumor development. Andersson and his team propose that the gray mutation stimulates growth of melanocytes and that this leads to a premature loss of the melanocyte stem cells needed for hair pigmentation whereas the mutation promotes an expansion of some of the melanocytes causing skin pigmentation. The gray mutation does not change any protein structure but it affects the genetic regulation of two genes.

(To oversimplify: the mutation causes two reactions, one in the skin and one in the coat. The key cells needed to color the hair are lost, while the key cells that color the skin multiply.)

The researchers found that the white horses carry an extra copy of a DNA segment located in one of these genes.

"It is very likely that regulatory mutations like the one we found in these white horses constitute the dominating class of mutations explaining differences between breeds of domestic animals," concludes Leif Andersson.

Now, that's news.