A mouse has been cloned from a single drop of blood. Researchers from the Riken BioResource Center in Japan were able to create the mouse embryo from just one drop of mouse blood from an adult individual, using a modified technique first used 17 years ago. The animal created by this process, a female mouse, lived a normal, healthy life and was even able to reproduce.
Mice have been cloned before from white blood cells collected from lymph nodes, bone marrow and livers, but this new method was the first one to successfully use peripheral blood to create a new individual.
Similar to the cloning procedure used to create Dolly the sheep, this method does not involve killing the donor animal, unlike more traditional methods. Dolly, sometimes called "The world's most famous sheep" was born in July 1996.
"This technique would be applicable for generating genetic copies of invaluable strains of mice, which cannot be preserved by other assisted reproductive techniques," researchers said.
The drop of blood was taken from the tail of the donor mouse, another female.
Atsuo Ogura led the team that extracted the white blood cells from the sample, and then used the cell nuclei in a process called somatic cell transfer. This process consists of removing the nucleus of a an adult body cell, like those in the mouse blood sample, and placing it into an unfertilized egg which has also had its nucleus removed.
The purpose of this research was to be able to find a way to easily clone mice that can be used in laboratory research. In many branches of medical research, it is necessary to produce large numbers of mice with specific characteristics or genetic defects. This new technique will make producing mice with the desired traits much easier than it was previously. Of the four different types of white blood cells available, the most successful varieties successfully created new animals just under three percent of the time.
"The efficiency of cloning from these cell types was very good... this is helpful if the intention is to use cloning to propagate and expand numbers of rare or valuable types of individual or species," Robin Lovell-Badge of the MRC National Institute of Medical Research in London, said.
Another research institute, linked to the Riken BioResource Center, has recently created 600 identical mice from a single individual after 25 rounds of cloning.
Research surrounding the project was detailed in the journal Biology of Reproduction.
