SHANGHAI, July 26 -- THIS little piggy is black and white, weighs 2kg and is the first cloned pig to be born in Shanghai.

The pig, which was born in Nanhui District on July 16, will be used in research for organ transplants and for pig breeding.

Zhang Defu, a professor of the Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Sciences in charge of the project, said the cloned pig is a little bigger than normal, is in good condition and has passed the dangerous first 48 hours when it was most likely to die.

The cloned pig is living with other newly born pigs and has a large white pig with abundant milk nursing it.

While the cloned piglet might now call this one mother, it has two other mothers - the cell used to create the pig came from the embryo of a Bama mini pig (a species from the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region) and it was then carried through pregnancy by a healthy white pig.

Chen Xuejin, an associate professor from Xinhua Hospital who is working on the cloning project, said Bama mini pigs were chosen to be cloned because the weight of a grown Bama mini pig is close to that of an adult human and the function and size of its organs are also similar to human organs.

The pig will help scientists study organ transplants and the cloning technology will be used to improve pig breeding.

Zhang said the research group tried transplanting embryos with 10 pigs altogether and between 170 and 200 embryos were transplanted every time. After three months, however, only one cloned pig was born successfully.

"It is more difficult to clone a pig than cloning a cow or a goat," Zhang said.

He explained that scientists must get rid of the original ovum first and plant the nucleus of the cell from the pig being cloned to develop an embryo in a test tube. Because it is hard to detect the cell nucleus of a pig even under a microscope, the success rate of pig cloning is quite low.

He said the research group will be closely observing the growth and later the reproductive ability of the cloned pig and it will work to improve the cloning success rate.