Re: How likely will commercial cloning of animals be in 10 years

  Well, the future of cloning is very hard to forsee.  Obviously i'm 
basically at the same level of understanding in this subject as you are, 
but i'll throw out some ideas of my own.
   All cloning that has occurred so far has been via nuclear 
transplantation followed by in vitro fertilization and implantation into a 
receptive "mother" animal.  Cloning of endangered animals and breeding 
stock would have it's own genetic pitfalls.  First of all, one of the 
major difficulties of expanding small populations of endangered species is 
genetic homozygosity.  This would only get worse if animals were cloned to 
create a large, homozygous population.  These sorts of populations are 
very prone to genetic defects, disease, and other problems associated with 
inbreeding.  The same would hold true with cloning breeding stocks.
   In may be that commercial cloning will never be a cost effective way to 
create animals with desired traits.  Nature has evolved to be very 
effective at procreation, whereas cloning could have some unforseen 
disadvantages in the long evolutionary run.  In addition, cloning is much 
more technically challenging and expensive than allowing animals to do 
what comes naturally in the first place.
   As for what type of condition the material will need to be in, only 
time will tell.  At this point, though, entire intact nuclei are required 
to get viable animals.  These nuclei are completely "alive", containing 
everything necessary to transcribe, control, and replicate their genome.  
It may very well be impossible to clone animals using only DNA as a 
starting material.
  So, that's my two cents worth.  Hope it's made you two cents richer. :)