Mouse cloned from drop of blood

So apparently some scientists in Japan have successfully cloned a female mouse from a single drop of blood, a mouse which “lived a normal lifespan and could give birth to young.” Circulating blood cells collected from the tail of a donor mouse were used to produce the clone, a team at the Riken BioResource Center reports in the journal Biology of Reproduction.

Although mice have been cloned from several different sources of donor cells including white blood cells found in the lymph nodes, bone marrow and liver, these scientists in Japan were investigating “whether circulating blood cells could also be used for cloning.” In their report in the American scientific journal Biology of Reproduction they said the study “demonstrated for the first time that mice could be cloned using the nuclei of peripheral blood cells.”

Their aim was to find an easily available source of donor cells to clone scientifically valuable strains of laboratory mice.

The team, led by Atsuo Ogura, of Riken BioResource Center in Tsukuba, took blood from the tail of a donor mouse, isolated the white blood cells, and used the nuclei for cloning experiments, using the same technique that produced Dolly the sheep in Edinburgh.

Read more here.

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• Helen Briggs, “Mouse cloned from drop of blood,” BBC News, posted June 26, 2013.