title: Successful serial recloning in the mouse over multiple generations.
abstract: Previous studies of serial cloning in animals showed a decrease in efficiency over repeated iterations and a failure in all species after a few generations. This limitation led to the suggestion that repeated recloning might be inherently impossible because of the accumulation of lethal genetic or epigenetic abnormalities. However, we have now succeeded in carrying out repeated recloning in the mouse through a somatic cell nuclear transfer method that includes a histone deacetylase inhibitor. The cloning efficiency did not decrease over 25 generations, and, to date, we have obtained more than 500 viable offspring from a single original donor mouse. The reprogramming efficiency also did not increase over repeated rounds of nuclear transfer, and we did not see the accumulation of reprogramming errors or clone-specific abnormalities. Therefore, our results show that repeated iterative recloning is possible and suggest that, with adequately efficient techniques, it may be possible to reclone animals indefinitely.
authors.affiliation: RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology, Kobe 650-0047, Japan.
authors.forename: Sayaka
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Wakayama
authors.forename: Takashi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Kohda
authors.forename: Haruko
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Obokata
authors.forename: Mikiko
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tokoro
authors.forename: Chong
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Yukari
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Terashita
authors.forename: Eiji
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Mizutani
authors.forename: Van Thuan
authors.initials: VT
authors.lastname: Nguyen
authors.forename: Satoshi
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kishigami
authors.forename: Fumitoshi
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ishino
authors.forename: Teruhiko
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Wakayama
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D019976:Cloning, Organism / Q000379:methods*; D044127:Epigenesis, Genetic; D051379:Mice