Mice can be cloned from other mice indefinitely, a new technique suggests.
Image: RIKEN
Watch out, George Lucas, there's a new attack of the clones, and these ones are furry.
Japanese researchers have created a potentially endless line of mice cloned from other cloned mice. They used the same technique that created Dolly the sheep to produce 581 mice from an original donor mouse through 25 rounds of cloning, the scientists report in the March 7 issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell.
"This technique could be very useful for the large-scale production of superior-quality animals, for farming or conservation purposes," study leader Teruhiko Wakayama of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, said in a statement.
The researchers used a cloning technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which a cell nucleus containing one individual's genetic information is inserted into an egg cell whose nucleus has been removed. Dolly the Sheep became the first cloned mammal in 1996 using this technique. Many other animals have been cloned since, but the technique has had a low success rate and attempts to "reclone" animals have often failed.
Genetic abnormalities that can accumulate over consecutive generations of clones may explain these failures, Wakayama said. [That's Odd! The 10 Weirdest Animal Discoveries]
In their study, Wakayama and colleagues grew the cloned cells in a solution containing trichostatin, a compound that interferes with enzymes that make changes to DNA. Using this technique, the cloning process was five times more successful.
The team successfully cloned the mice 25 consecutive times. In other words, they cloned one mouse, then cloned those clones, and so on. A total of 581 healthy mice were made, all of which were fertile and lived a normal life span of about two years. The efficiency of making the cloned cells neither worsened nor improved over the generations.
"This is a very important set of results," geneticist George Church of Harvard Medical School told LiveScience. It's "not just that it's 25 sequential clonings, it's that they found a way to improve things five-fold," Church said. Figuring out what didn't work was equally important, he added.
No abnormalities accumulated in the mice, even after repeated cloning, the researchers found. "Our results show that repeated iterative recloning is possible and suggest that, with adequately ef?cient techniques, it may be possible to reclone animals inde?nitely," the authors wrote in the study.
In 2008, Wakayama's team created clones from the bodies of mice that had been frozen for 16 years. Other researchers have successfully recloned cows, pigs and cats, but not beyond three generations. Scientists have also created stem cells from cloned human embryos, but ethical and scientific barriers to human cloning remain.
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10 Comments
Add CommentYeah, cause desease won't screw that up. NOT!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGreat - a superior army of clones can be grown to eliminate the redundant global population - the solution to all of humanity's problems <%{
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisImmortal??
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWon't cellular senescence eventually put a stop to that?
Not if you freeze the cells you use as a basis for cloning, I think (or at least chill them enough that cellular metabolism ceases). But I'm just guessing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGreat. Now Dr. Evil can also create a Mini Mouse.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf one day
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthis technology are used in other objects.
It seems that many lives can live longer than their own actual ages.
The cause of the Irish potato famine was them just using one species of tubor. If all our livestock are cloned won't we be doing the same thing, and thus get the same type disaster?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't recall seeing this on the the first read.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Wakayama and colleagues grew the cloned cells in a solution containing trichostatin, a compound that interferes with enzymes that make changes to DNA."
Well, ...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisnot that it helps the individual.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this