Scientists in Japan have dramatically advanced their field by successfully cloning a mouse from only a single drop of blood.
Every time a new story is released about cloning we all tend to get a little bit excited. We've all grown up watching films set in some distant future where humans are cloned willy nilly, and we've all day dreamed about how different our lives would be if we had a clone to do all our chores for us.
Well this latest development is just another step forward in our path towards making human cloning a reality. For the first time, circulating blood cells from the tail of a donor mouse have been used to produce a clone of that mouse.
Now, this isn't the first time that this sort of thing has happened, with clones previously being grown from white blood cells taken from the bone marrow and the liver. However, this is the first time that a clone has been produced with such ease, from a sample of cells that can be so easily extracted.
The immediate benefit of this is that important genetic strains of mice can now be easily maintained and duplicated, to prevent the loss of important genetic information. This research will also allow for the large-scale production of animals that are considered of a 'high quality'. For example, if one cow produces much more milk than all the other cows, we can now take a sample of blood from that cow and produce an infinite number of clones, all of whom also produce a large quantity of milk.
However, this sort of thing could have been done before. This research has only managed to make these procedures a bit easier. The main area of impact this will have is on the conservation of endangered species, from which only a small tissue sample is available. This means that we will be able to produce a population of an endangered species that are all clones of each other, who will then be able to produce more young in a more natural way. Whilst this may seem worse than incestuous, i think we can all agree it's still better than extinction.
Whilst I wish I could be writing; 'Human cloning is now a reality!'... I can't. But that doesn't mean that it's never going to happen. In fact, keep up to date with this blog and you never know, you could be reading those words in less time than you think.
For the full article go to this link: http://www.biolreprod.org/content/early/2013/06/25/biolreprod.113.110098.abstract
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