The first cloned mouse born from dead skin: The prospect of reviving prehistoric monsters

According to the Daily Mail, a team of Japanese scientists has created the first healthy cloned mice from freeze-dried somatic cells, specifically skin cells. These cloned mice can even mate and give birth naturally.

Somatic cells and mice cloned in the laboratory

Somatic cells are animal cells other than sperm and egg cells. "We found that frozen somatic cells can generate healthy and fertile clones," explained the authors from Yamanashi University in Kofu, Japan.

An organism can provide an infinite number of somatic cells, which greatly facilitates cloning. The cells tested are skin cells, which only need to be stored at a low negative temperature of -30 degrees Celsius, instead of being preserved as deep as -196 degrees Celsius like sperm cells.

After 9 months of freezing, these dead mouse cells were cloned, resulting in successful embryos. The process of "rescuing DNA" and creating cloned mice has a success rate of 0.2%-5.4%.

The authors acknowledge that freeze-drying cells causes more DNA damage than storing cells using modern methods, but that the above properties make cell storage much easier.

Quite a few cloned mice showed DNA damage, but some were completely healthy both physically and physiologically.

It's a turning point in the dream of reviving extinct prehistoric monsters, because we certainly can't ask nature to preserve them at the very deep sub-zero temperatures that sperm or egg cells require.

The study has just been published in Nature Communications.

According to Science Alert, previously the only type of frozen cells that successfully produced offspring were sperm cells, which were tested by another research group.

However, this is not the optimal solution because it is very difficult to extract qualified sperm cells or eggs/oocytes for cloning. For organisms found in the state of cold fossils, it is even less feasible because we will not have many options.