What I’ve read is that pluripotent stem cells can’t form a placenta and “cannot develop into an entire organism on their own.” If this is the case then how are cloned animals created using pluripotent stem cells?
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Where did you get this information ?
Most cloned animals start with a donor egg from which the nucleus is removed and a nucleus from the OG animal.
The nucleus from the OG animal act more or less as the sperm + regular egg dna.
So they actually start as totipotent stem cells.
Your premise is false. You’re mixing up reproductive cloning with therapeutic cloning. Cloned organisms don’t use pluripotent stem cells, they use nuclear DNA taken from the somatic cell of an organism that is transplanted into a donor egg cell. Therapeutic cloning uses stem cells but therapeutic cloning doesn’t and isn’t intended to create a new organism, just a line of cells.
Cloned animals are not created using pluripotent stem cells (induced or otherwise). Those cells can differentiate into more or less anything but require instructions, from neighbouring cells, hormones, etc. A new organism won’t just grow from these.
For that, you need a fertilized egg cell. If you intend to clone an entire organism, you can take a fertilized egg cell, remove its nucleus, and replace it with one from the animal you’re trying to clone.
Note also that an egg cell is *totipotent*, as another comment also points out. That’s another step above pluripotency and refers to the fact that it (or more accurately, its descendants) can and will differentiate into literally everything. Pluripotency as seen in stem cells has some limits.
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