Can a mouse be cloned indefinitely? Decades-long experiment has answers
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Scientists harvested eggs from 25th-generation cloned mice and fertilized the eggs, which grew into these early-stage embryos. Credit: Univ. Yamanashi
After 20 years, 58 generations and more than 30,000 cloning attempts, a team of researchers has hit the limit on the number of times a single mouse can be serially re-cloned.
The results, published on 24 March in Nature Communications1, suggest that asexual reproduction is ultimately unsustainable for mice, and potentially other mammals, too. The clones looked normal and lived as long as normal mice. But large mutations — including the loss of an entire chromosome — accumulated in the cloned lineage at an unusually high rate.
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