Japanese scientists have cloned healthy mice from bodies kept in deep freeze for 16 years. Skip related content The breakthrough increases the possibility of "resurrecting" extinct animals such as mammoths from their frozen remains. Until now Dolly the Sheep-style cloning has only been achieved using live donor cells, from which DNA is transferred to recipient eggs. Cloning from thawed frozen cells was thought to be difficult, if not impossible, because their DNA would be damaged by ice crystals. This presented a major obstacle to hopes of raising mammoths and other extinct animals preserved in ice from the dead. But a team of scientists from the Centre for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, has now overcome the problem by successfully producing mouse clones from mice frozen at minus 20C for up to 16 years. After thawing out the dead mice, the researchers collected nuclei from cells in their brain tissue. These were injected into empty eggs whose own DNA had been removed, to generate cloned embryos. Stem cells taken from the embryos were then used in a second round of cloning. Their genetic material was inserted into denucleated eggs, to produce embryos that grew into four mouse clones. A further nine "chimeric" mouse clones were created by mixing the cells of different embryos.
They actually found a Mammoth with viable DNA years ago (accordingly) it was trapped under a rockslide near springs (trapping under the massive ammounts of ice).... and the whole talk of impregnating an indian elephant came...5 years later nothing.... Imagine mammoth t-bone!
I personally hope this technology goes somewhere... I've always wanted my own pet Velociraptor. (If you can train a falcon why not a raptor?)
*Watches glass of water on the desk tremble* I'm not sure if I should be pleased or worried about this. I'll settle for a combination of both. On one hand Jurassic Park was an awesome movie, and I've never seen a Sabre Tooth before, on the other, someone is likely to do something stupid. Interesting though.
I think I would feel sorry for an ancient, extinct animal brought back to life today. It would be the only one of its kind, in a strange environment for which it was not designed eating food that may of may not have even been around in its own time. We would have no idea how to properly care it. We would observe its behavior and think we had an understanding of what teh creatures would have been like, but we would be observing it in very unnatural settings which would screw those results. I am morbidly curious, but would feel sorry for a mammoth suddenly walking around in our global warming. However, if cloning could bring back a recently extinct animal (or keep an endangered one from going extinct) I am all for it.
Well going to see a mammoth or a sabre Tooth tiger at the zoo would certinly be a change from seeing the usual animals at the zoo.
While it would be cool to see prehistoric life it would be dangerous. Jurassic Park says it perfectly, those animals lived in a different time, no friends, just the hunters and the hunted, it would most likely end badly, but be sweet until it happened.
Australian news always lies, its our way They even showed a plane crashing last night that had lost its weing....they said the pilot was lucky to survive............lthe footage was of a moodel plane, it was fake lol On cloning, it would be cool if we could bring back some awsome plant life!
I am looking forward to the day when they can clone specific organs and tissues without cloning a whole body. It would be great for transplants. I am also looking forward to being able to clone meat without cloning the whole animal to abuse and exploit. Although, I suppose that would ruin the meat industry and destroy jobs and leave us with millions of farm animals that serve no purpose, but still... lol
Jurassic Park mice makes me think of the rats in some of Boston's back alleys. They can reach the size of large housecats. and have a take no crap attitude. There's no experience quite like being pursued by a pissed off and territorial river rat!
I thought the Dolly cloning produced offspring with accelerated aging. If so, how would this impact Jurassic mice?
Cloning tech is still very primitive, and the replication introduces errors which shorten the lives of the clones. Some of this may be inherent in using DNA from post-natal hosts, and some may be ameliorated by advances in the science of cloning. I suspect that there will always be some unavoidable degradation from one generation to the next\. Hell, even the Asgard were unable to solve that one!
Lol! Ten points for the reference. Is it sad that the first time I saw this thread, my first thought was "asgard"? And their solution to genetic degredation was...a little extreme.
I have a picture in my head of little mice on unicycles, wearing smiley face paint, hooting horns and throwing custard pies at each other... Quite a breakthrough indeed.
I don't know. Actually, I seem to remember they were born pregnant, thus they must have reproduced asexually.
