Two Austin, Texas-based companies have joined forces to create a 'one stop' cloning and licensing service for livestock breeders. The merger of Start Licensing and Viagen will enable customers to secure licenses for reproducing breeding stock to preserve traits of prized animals—such as disease resistance and superior-quality meat—and contract in-house cloning services from one provider. Start Licensing, set up in 2005 by Geron of California and Phoenix, Arizona–based Exeter Life Sciences, manages and licenses a portfolio of 80 patents for nuclear transfer cloning technologies, including those developed at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, while ViaGen, a subsidiary of Exeter, offers cloning services for breeders who lack in-house expertise. The move comes just months after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) concluded that food from cloned animal sources is safe to eat (Nat. Biotechnol. 26, 249–250, 2008). Steve Stice of Aruna Biomedical, Georgia, previously of ViaGen, thinks the technology will struggle to find more than a niche market. “There is a demand, but how big is debatable. Until the major food producers are willing to say they will use these animals in their production systems, the market will be fairly limited,” he says. Smithfield Foods, a major pork producer, owns a stake in the new enterprise but is not planning to produce meat products from cloned animals.