Now Mice Can Be Cloned From Other Mice Indefinitely
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.
http://www.businessinsider.com/mice-can-be-cloned-from-other-mice-indefinitely-2013-3
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