China’s first cloned police dog born using the genes of a honored police dog has been born and is now ready for training in Kunming, southwest China’s Yunnan province.

Kunxun, the special dog, was born in January 2019 and was cloned from genes of Huahuangma, a seven-year-old female dog from Kunming who was honored after helping to solve dozens of murder cases, the Science and Technology Daily reported.

Preparations for Kunxun’s birth started last September when a millimeter-size skin sample of Huahuangma was taken for cell cultivation. Scientists then took egg cells from another female dog to create an enucleated egg cell, which was then injected with the nucleus cultivated from Huahuangma. After the clone embryo was created, it was then implanted in another female surrogate for the birth, according to Liu Xiaojuan, a scientist on the project.

According to tests done at the Ministry of Public Security’s dog training base, Kunxun’s DNA shares 99.9% similarity with Huahuangma, proving the successful cloning of the first police dog in China.

The healthy puppy will undergo three to five months of training at the base to prepare for professional course trainings, such as drug detection or suspect tracking. The puppy has shown the same energy and friendliness of the donor dog.

China has tens of thousands of police dogs, but thousands more are needed across the nation. It is hard and expensive to train a perfect police dog, explained Wan Jiusheng, a researcher at the police dog training base in Kunming.

“At present, the cloned police dog is still in the laboratory stage. I hope that in the next 10 years, after the technology matures and scales, we can batch clone honored dogs,” Wan was quoted as saying.

The project also mulls to establish a cell base from honored dogs like Huahuangma to preserve the best genes of police dogs for 50 years, Wan revealed.