Scientists Cloned Mice from Freeze-Dried Skin Cells, Opening the Door to Biopreservation [* AC *]
upstart writes:
Scientists Cloned Mice From Freeze-Dried Skin Cells, Opening the Door to Biopreservation:
On the surface, Dorami was just an average mouse. She grew to a healthy weight, had pups of her own, and died naturally near her second birthday-roughly 70 years in human age, and completely unexceptional for a lab mouse.
Except for one thing: Dorami was cloned from freeze-dried cells. And not just any cell-she was cloned from somatic cells (the cells that make up our bodies) rather than sperm or eggs.
Dorami is the latest foray into a decades-long push to use cloning as a way to preserve biodiversity. The triumph of Dolly the sheep made it clear that it's possible to revive animals using reproductive cells. The dream of restoring extinct animals, or biobanking current ones, has captured the imagination of scientists ever since. One powerful way to preserve a species' DNA is to store sperm in liquid nitrogen. At roughly -320 degrees Fahrenheit, the cells can be frozen in time for years.
But there's one hiccup. Collecting reproductive cells from animals on the brink of extinction is-to put it mildly-extremely difficult. In contrast, scratching off a few skin cells or shaving some fur is relatively simple. These cells contain the animal's complete DNA, but they're fragile.
The new study, led by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama at the University of Yamanashi in Japan, made the leap from sperm to skin. Developing a highly technical recipe that would make any fine-dining chef proud, the team successfully cloned 75 healthy mice from freeze-dried somatic cells collected from both male and female donors. Many offspring, including Dorami, went on to have pups of their own.
With a success rate of roughly five percent at most-and as low as 0.2 percent-the technique is far from efficient. But the strategy carves a path towards the bigger picture: our ability to store and potentially revive genetic variations of near-extinct species.
[...] Ultimately, this is just the first step. Somatic cells are easier to capture compared to reproductive ones, especially for infertile or juvenile animals. Doing it easier and cheaper is a plus. The team is now looking to capture genetic material from cadavers or feces to broaden the scope.
Journal Reference:
Wakayama, Sayaka, Ito, Daiyu, Hayashi, Erika, et al. Healthy cloned offspring derived from freeze-dried somatic cells [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-31216-4)
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