Frozen Mouse Cloned, Are Mammoths Next?
A clone of my own – “brownie” at left is happy, healthy and warm! The successful cloning by Japanese researchers of a mouse kept in deep freeze for 16 years has sparked hope that prehistoric Woolly Mammoths may walk the Earth again one day. Cloning remains a futuristic technology even though dozens of different animals have been successfully cloned since Dolly the sheep made history in 1996. A Japanese research team from the Institute of Physical and Chemical Science at RIKEN (a government-funded natural sciences research institute) has now gone “back to the future” by cloning mice from donor mouse tissue kept frozen for the past 16 years! According to results published in the November 4 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the 4 healthy baby mice were the result of a new nuclear transfer technique that allows non-living cells to be used as DNA donors. Up until now, only living cells have been successfully cloned. To quote PNAS, “Nuclear transfer techniques could b
Related Questions
- It is interesting to note that only the mammoths and wooly rhinoceri are found frozen in Siberia (Weber, 1980, pp.15-16). If a sudden disaster overwhelmed the entire area, don you think that we would find a whole range of preserved animals?
- What is frozen mouse sperm generally used for in laboratories? Why is it important?
- What is frozen crabmeat?
