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RIKEN
Mice can be cloned from other mice indefinitely, a new technique suggests.
By Tanya Lewis, LiveScience
Watch out, George Lucas, there's a new attack of the clones, and these ones are furry.
Japanese researchers have created a potentially endless line of mice cloned from other cloned mice. They used the same technique that created Dolly the sheep to produce 581 mice from an original donor mouse through 25 rounds of cloning, the scientists report in the March 7 issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell.
"This technique could be very useful for the large-scale production of superior-quality animals, for farming or conservation purposes," study leader Teruhiko Wakayama of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, said in a statement
The researchers used a cloning technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which a cell nucleus containing one individual's genetic information is inserted into an egg cell whose nucleus has been removed. Dolly the Sheep became the first cloned mammal in 1996 using this technique. Many other animals have been cloned since, but the technique has had a low success rate and attempts to "reclone" animals have often failed.
Genetic abnormalities that can accumulate over consecutive generations of clones may explain these failures, Wakayama said. [That's Odd! The 10 Weirdest Animal Discoveries]
In their study, Wakayama and colleagues grew the cloned cells in a solution containing trichostatin, a compound that interferes with enzymes that make changes to DNA. Using this technique, the cloning process was five times more successful.
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.
Related story: Mice get human brain cells and get smarter, too
"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 efficient techniques, it may be possible to reclone animals indefinitely," 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.
Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter @tanyalewis314. Follow us @livescience, Facebook or Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.
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Leave a Comment:
Just what the world needs. Another 581 mice. And why do we need " large-scale production of superior-quality animals for farming"? Farmers are more than capable of raising their own animals. They've been doing it a lot longer than these scientists have been growing mice in labs.
Clearly this "sciency' stuff is not your thing. Stick with things you actually understand.
581 mice with the exact same genetic make up can allow scientific study of diseases such as Alzheimer's, cancer etc to be compared to each other and a cure found.
I'm for responsible animal research but the gateway of this science may have a sinister bent if this method was applied to human cloning. Cloud Atlast? The human... then a clone.... then a clone of a clone? mmm.
This also removes one of the barriers to human cloning by reducing the chance that a human that was mentally or physically disabled by the process would result if brought to term.
I believe that the clearest short path to immortality lies down this path, and with 6 billion facing certain death with more on the way, it is inevitable that it will be tried. Look at all the crazy things we have done for the sake of religion. We are all concerned with what happens at the end of our lives. Even more so as it grows closer.
How many people facing the end of their lives would be willing to create a cloned copy of themselves, and have it raised from an infant. No doubt making sure that it took very good care of itself, exercising, eating correctly, and so on. Then when it was sufficiently developed, say between 16 and 20 years old, remove it's brain and replace it with their own.
The ethical dilemma in this is apparent, a young man or woman must be murdered in order for it to work. This isn't a fuzzy area like abortion where you can say that it isn't really a life because it hasn't experienced anything yet. There is no question that this would be murder, is there?
The technology for this scenario is being developed. The cloning as described above is obviously making progress. Brain transplants are also being experimented with on mice with equally positive results using fetal neural stem cells that can also be derived from cloning. Cloning of humans is going to happen soon, the brain transplant technology has 16-20 years to perfect itself.
If a man or woman could use this crude tecnology to exend his life over a century into the future, other less objectional ways to stave off death might be found.
Some rich SOB, terrified at the prospect of his own death is bound to try it.
Cloning your cell line doesn't make you immortal. Not more than having an identical twin makes you alive when you die.
I don't think you understand how it works. An egg is not a young man or woman.
I think dan was referring to the possibility of tissue transplants from syngenic clones of oneself, as mentioned in their comment about the brain.
Indeed that would likely be the greatest barrier to "immortality" in the colloquial sense. In some ways, any organism is already immortal (with modifications), insofar as the germ line continues until it no longer reproduces, and acquires mutations over time (i.e. life "continues"). The real problem is that our sentience is not immortal, and as of yet we have no way to efficiently transfer it to later generations - education takes a lifetime :)
And so it begins...........
Very scary stuff.......
Nuff said.......
Cloning your cell line doesn't make you immortal, but cloning your heart or other organs when they wear out can extend your life indefinitely.
Yes. There is no question. Cloning your body parts so that they can be replaced is absolutely not murder.
Only unless you are an extreme anti-abortionist and believe that every single cell that could become a person IS actually a person, then yes, you would believe that cloning a heart several hearts, only one of which get used, is murder.
New things are always scary. Doesn't mean we should go back to caves and grunting at each other.
I'm curious. How did they get around the telomere problem. I thought one of the issues with cloning techniques was accelerated aging because the cells had already undergone several divisions before cloning. Those divisions would reduce the length of the telomeres and eventually result in the effects of aging due to genetic damage. Growing the cells initially in the trichostatin would reduce genetic modification and damage during the cloning process, but this wouldn't reduce the damage after the mouse was born. When they say 25 generations, how long did they wait before transferring the genetic material from one generation to the next cell?
I am talking about raising a clone of yourself to adulthood, then replacing it's brain with your own, allowing you to continue your life in a young healthy body. Definitely murder of a human being.
This would involve developing 2 processes. The ability to clone humans as successfully as is currently possible with mice according to this article, and the ability to successfully transplant the parts of the brain that are responsible from personality and memory as described in this article:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Can_you_have_a_brain_transplant.
As I pointed out above, once you create the clone you have about 16-20 years to perfect the brain transplant procedure while your clone matures. You might want to get started on this in your 50's!
Did anyone see the movie "The Island" where individuals were cloned so that they could remove body parts to keep the original person alive when their organs started to wear out. Interesting movie.
I just hope they don't clone any humans that always say, "Nuff said."
You clearly don't understand the concept of cloning. Your clone is not you..it's essentially your twin.
It may someday be possible to wipe a brain of all memory & replace it with other memories. The brain is essentially a biological computer & is electrical so such a development isn't totally out of the question. Immortality could be achieved by recording the memories & inserting the info into the new brain or perhaps direct transfer of memory. Much like backing up a computer on a hard drive you would only lose what was stored in the old unit since the last update if the recording method could be used. The morality of the action depends on the consciousness of the replacement model & if a body could be brought to a physical maturity level capable of accepting the transfer without a consciousness of it's own there would be no murder.
I don't know, the Asgard relied on cloning and it resulted in the death of the race. Just ask Thor, Oh wait, you can't because he's dead.
It's not full cloning because it doesn't transfer mitochondrii.
Time to start cloning more important animals now. Like the ones that are endangered, for instance.
I suggest cloning literate and numerate humans, since they are in short supply these days, really . . .
Really! :-o
The CIA could clone Pee-wee Herman and use the Pee-wee clones to interrogate terrorists at Gitmo, where a typical interrogation session would begin with a team of Pee-wees in a brightly lit room with a box of Chatty Cathy dolls that only say "Pee-wee", where for the next few hours the Pee-wee clones will pull the Chatty Cathys' strings and then say "That's my name, don't wear it out" over and over and over . . .
This could be more frightening to terrorists than waterboarding or the infamous thumb screw, really . . .
Really! :-o
There aren't enough mice in the world already? Next thing you know they'll be cloning rats. And then it will escalate to the worst possible scenario: cloning more humans. Why not try cloning something the world needs more of?
Nearly all medical and viral testing are done on animals such as mice and rats. Why? They are very similar to us and we don't have to be completely 100% ethical about it. You're missing the huge picture here, if they can clone rats, they can clone extinct animals, they can bring the animals that are on the brink of extinction such as the elephants and tigers, think about having a Dodo bird as a pet.
But we need humans or at least the parts, one of the biggest issues of health care is the lack of transplants for you and I.
Don't try and understand this "sciency" stuff. It's clearly not your thing.
With all the mice making the same tasty meal, the bacteria, viruses, parasites and prions, will not need work so hard to adapt to their meal. One mouse could sneeze and all the rest could be soon gone.
Soon laws will be passed to award full citizenship and property rights to a each and ever single cell fertilized or not. Who's know how this life came to be? It will be decided not by living well, but by notions of invention, copyright and political affiliation. Juries will denote life for some and none others by clonal test.
Soon enough the mixing of genes to preadapt against illness, disease, speed development will be seen as commercially viable, then made by law to displace lesser lives.
It does not matter what we invent, we will be hamstring by the haves holding dearly what belongs to the have nots.
Scary, but intriguing.
How long before we get a clone of ourselves for organ transplant?
It is already starting for the mega rich.
translated; Humans wiil be farmed for various purposes. Just a matter of time. Very short time.
It's like when Yogi Berra said...."It's déjà vu all over again", and again, and again, and again, and aga........... LOL!!
I better make myself scarce if I don't want to get cloned. They're definitely going to want an endless supply of perfect humans!
If you go IVF for goods, good time to bank the extra zygotes for cloning projects. If you can trigger one in vitro to proliferate as a blastocyst, and help yourself to a few cells...
It's interesting that when people are promoting Frankencattle for beef and dairy products and Frankenfish for seafood entrees they always suggest that somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) is perfect, but when researchers find a way which appears to reduce the incidence of horrible mutations and other genetic malfunctions, SCNT is revealed to be considerably less than perfect, really . . .
Really! :-o
P. S. It makes a bit of sense to print this article, so that once you determine the obfuscated failure rate of SCNT, you will have some actual data which you can quote when arguing with the Frankenfood folks who suggest that Frankenclones used for food production should be granted Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) status without any actual long-term testing, not only of the Frankenclones but also of the people who consume the Frankenfood, really . . .
Really! :-o
Science is a window that gives us momentary peeks into God's intellect and imagination, the more scientific knowledge we acquire, the more we know God.
Yours is the first god I may actually be able to believe in!
Is not "my" God, it is just God, I simply see no disconnect between God and science. You see, humans dont make the sciences, they only discover them, so since God is the creator of all logic dictates that God created the sciences we humans discover. They are essentially tools left for us to discover and make use of. After all math, the laws of chemistry, physics, energy, and all other sciences existed LONG before humans did.