14 DAY TRIAL // There was a time when cloning an animal was a painstaking task. But not anymore. In fact, it appears that all it takes to engineer a cloned animal is a single drop of blood that a donor has more or less willingly parted with.
Writing in the journal Biology of Reproduction, a team of Japanese scientists explain how they were able to clone a mouse using run-off-the-mill blood cells collected from the tail of another rodent.
What's interesting is that, according to the Riken BioResource Center researchers that carried out these experiments, the cloned rodent that they engineered lived a normal lifespan.
The mouse was a female, and was even able to reproduce, Daily Mail reports.
The same source informs us that, it order to obtain this cloned specimen, the scientists first had to isolate the white cells found in the blood collected from the donor's tail.
These white cells were then stripped of their nuclei, which were subjected to a series of procedures and made to give birth to a new mouse.
More precisely, the nuclei were injected into an egg cell whose nuclear DNA had been previously removed by the researchers.
Once inside the egg cell, the nuclei compelled it to turn into an early-stage embryo whose genetic make-up was the same as that of the donor from whom the white blood cells were collected in the first place.
This method of cloning animals is known to the scientific community as somatic cell nuclear transfer. It is the same procedure that allowed scientists to create Dolly, the famous cloned sheep.
Until now, cloned animals have been created with the help of nuclei extracted from white cells found in lymph nodes and the liver.
As the Japanese scientists point out, the success of their experiments “demonstrated for the first time that mice could be cloned using the nuclei of peripheral blood cells.”