Blood Clone

A team of scientists from the RIKEN Center for Development Biology in Kobe, Japan have for the first time cloned a mouse from a single drop of blood. They claim to have used the circulating blood cells collected from the tail of a donor mouse to produce its clone.

Re-cloning from the same cell diminishes returns of the clone. And thus researchers devised an alternative to avoid this following which success rates increased from 3% to 10%. Scientists used the Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) for this process which involves transferring the nucleus from an adult body cell such as blood or skin cell into an unfertilised egg which has its nucleus removed. The success rate of SCNT being as low as 3 percent, scientists first drew 10-15 μl of blood from a mouse’s tail and collected white blood cells from that sample. The nuclei were then extracted from the white blood cells after which scientists continued with the normal SCNT process. This new technique leaves the donor animal virtually unharmed and allows a single donor to be the clone source multiple times. It can also be used for generating genetic copies of invaluable strains of mice which cannot be preserved by other assisted reproductive techniques such as conventional in vitro fertilisation or intracytoplasmic sperm injection.

The cloned mouse lived for 23 months which is common for a lab mouse and was proved to be fertile for natural mating. The research is aimed at large scale production of farm animals.

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