June 28 - Mouse cloned from just a drop of blood

A team of Japanese scientists has cloned a mouse from a single drop of blood, demonstrating for the first time that mice can be duplicated using "circulating blood cells."

Announcing their findings in the journal Biology of Reproduction, the researchers described how they took blood from the tail of a donor mouse, isolated the white blood cells and used the nuclei for cloning trials. This process is called "somatic nuclear cell transfer", the same cloning technique scientists used to produce Dolly the sheep in 1996, the BBC reported.

The cloned female mouse lived a full life and was able to reproduce, the researchers told the BBC. They added that the easy availability of the circulating blood cells gives them hope that they can now reproduce more scientifically valuable lab mice.