WASHINGTON, Feb 14: A playful “cute as a button” kitten is the first-ever cloned cat, researchers said on Thursday.

The two-month-old kitten called “Cc:” is the first successful product of a programme aimed at letting people clone their beloved pets at Texas A&M University in College Station.

The kitten joins a growing list of animals that have been cloned from adult cells, starting with Dolly the sheep and now including pigs, goats, cattle, mice and an oxlike creature called a gaur.

“She is as cute as a button,” said a spokeswoman for Texas A&M, where the work was done using a grant from philanthropist John Sperling’s Apollo Group Inc.

“The kitten was vigorous at birth and appears to be completely normal,” Mark Westhusin and colleagues write in their report in a letter published in the science journal Nature.

The kitten is a calico-and-white shorthair that looks similar to, but not exactly like, her genetic mother. The kitten looks very different from the tabby that gave birth to her.

The scientists said her coat colouring was unique because not only genetics contribute to an animal’s markings, but also conditions in the womb.

Westhusin’s team said the kitten was cloned from a cumulus cell. These cells nurture the developing eggs in a female’s ovary and have been used to clone other animals as well, as they seem particularly adaptable to the process.

It took the researchers 188 tries to get just one kitten. They got 82 embryos but only one cat got pregnant, with a single kitten. Westhusin said it is not clear how easy it will be to clone cats.

Westhusin’s efforts were funded by Sperling’s Genetic Savings & Clone, set up with the intent of helping people clone their pets.—Reuters