With 581 Copies So Far, Reclonable Mouse Will Live Forever
Squeak^25 Mice from the 24th and 25th generations of cloning RIKENBiologists have developed a new cloning technique that lets them create new clones indefinitely, and keeps the animals' normal lifespans, too. Biologists in Japan have cloned 581 mice from one original donor mouse, Livescience reported. The scientists made the mice over 25 generations of cloning; that is, from making clones from clones from clones, 25 times over. They could probably make animal clones indefinitely, the research team wrote in a paper published last week in the journal Cell Stem Cell. Really. Check out the last sentence of their abstract: "Our results show that repeated iterative recloning is possible and suggest that, with adequately efficient techniques, it may be possible to reclone animals indefinitely." The 581 cloned mice were made using an improved version of somatic cell nuclear transfer, the technique that created Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996. Previously, researchers using somatic nuclear...